


Glitch

by blue_chocolate



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Death, Drug Use, Gaslighting, Human Trafficking, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kidnapping, M/M, Mild Gore, Mutual Masturbation, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2017-03-01
Packaged: 2018-07-23 13:54:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 58,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7465929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_chocolate/pseuds/blue_chocolate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sunny Hills, Yorkshire. Winner of <em>"Best Kept Town"</em> seven years in a row. Criminal hotspot.<br/><br/>After four years of related abductions across the county, an entire family disappears without a trace. With local authorities doing little to solve the case, it falls to two high school wannabe-detectives to bring their friend home: Louis Tomlinson, a dauntless city boy thrown headlong into the suburbs, and Zayn Malik, an aspiring journalist with a feel for dirty secrets. There's also the matter of the Styles next door, who raise more questions than they answer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Hills

**Author's Note:**

> This was sort of inspired by an all-time childhood "favourite": Hot Fuzz.
> 
> There are topics in this fic I haven't tagged for purpose of not spoiling the story, such as lower-key/past relationships and plot devices. The trafficking in question is not of a sexual nature and all sexual contact in this fic will be consensual. The warning of graphic depiction of violence is mostly to ensure that readers uncomfortable with the topic are warned -- it is not described explicitly, but there are many milder doses of it. If you want a detailed description of the tags, feel free to message me on here: whellks.tumblr.com
> 
> I don't own One Direction. This story is purely fictional.

_IF YOU CAN'T GO BACK, WHERE THE HELL DO YOU GO?_

* * *

 

Lottie had pointed out that their new house had the colour of vomit – a fact Louis could not deny. Every day since, when collecting a new round of moving boxes from the car, or returning from the grocer’s shop, she would repeat the statement. One night they were both lectured by their mum at dinner, and Louis couldn’t comprehend how he could have possibly deserved her complaints. Stressed like she was, their mum didn’t sense the light tone in Lottie’s words, and proceeded telling them that this was the only house they could afford and then re-told them about the reasons that made them move in the first place.

“You sure picked the worst house in Sunny,” Niall said where he perched on Louis’ windowsill. For emphasis, he raised an eyebrow. “It’s the finest shade of vomit.”

“I know,” Louis said.

Niall’s parents and Jay entertained themselves downstairs with the bottle of champagne the Horans had brought over; the card tied around its neck had read _Welcome to Sunny Hills!_ Their crackling laughter breached the upper floor.

“I’ll have to introduce you to the gang soon,” Niall said, pushing the window open. “Well, _gang_ is probably overrated,” he continued and placed his foot on the roof, heaving himself out, “It’s only Liz and Zaf. They’ll be at the charity dinner tomorrow.”

The night crept into Louis’ bedroom with cricket song and soft pattering. Niall remained under the window nook, safe from the rain. With a slant of his mouth and an outstretched hand, he beckoned Louis from the bed. Together they huddled on the shingles and swept their eyes across the neighbourhood.

“Doesn’t look like a criminal hotspot,” Louis said.

“Do you mean the snatchings?”

“I thought being here would feel different. I mean, you read the papers and create an image, but this doesn’t feel like anything. It doesn’t feel real.”

Niall tipped his head back to the murky skies. “I can relate to that.”

Water tickled his naked ankles and he glanced to see if Niall was bothered by the sensation. The boy just gauged the dim streetlights.

“Have you known any of them?”

“Not directly. But you can’t help but knowing everyone in a town like this.”

Louis plucked a lump of moss from between the tiles. He caught the waver in Niall’s smile, a single scratch on a spinning record. He racked his brain for more appropriate topics.

“Up until four days ago I’ve only lived in this one city, and we barely spoke to the other tenants. Mum’s gone on and on about how wonderful these towns are, about how it ‘takes her back to her childhood’ or something.”

Niall tugged his hoodie down over his knees in a shiver. “So, how does this compare to the city?”

“You always hear about how dangerous it is, the city, and that you shouldn’t go alone to this place and that place but I’m already feeling way more rebellious in this house. I’ve never climbed out of a window before!”

Niall laughed. Louis’ ego swelled in accomplishment.

“Once I broke my foot trying to jump from a window,” Niall said. “Lacrosse, I told mum. She worries too much. I was fourteen and wanted to sneak out, grab a midnight snack with Liz. But I fell and I screamed until every household on the street stood on the front lawn and dad had to carry me back upstairs.”

Light welled over the lawn as the front door opened below them and loud voices morphed into a quiet cadence. After saying their goodbyes and acting humble about the champagne, Mr Horan popped open an umbrella and guided his wife onto the pavement.

“Looks like we’re heading home,” Niall said. “Please tell me you won’t be sitting out the dinner tomorrow?”

“Even if I wanted to bail it wouldn’t be possible. Besides, aren’t you going to introduce me to your gang?”

Niall shook his head. “Sounds more and more like a tiny mafia each time I hear it. I think you’ll be on great terms with Liz. You’re both inexperienced window-climbers.”

Without saying goodnight, he stood up, feet unsteady. He used the water to his advantage, skidding down the slope, and landed in the most graceful way possible on the lawn. Only a bush of blond hair pierced the night when he took off in a jog towards his house.

And so he was gone.

 

✘

 

The following afternoon, Jay Tomlinson broke off the family’s biweekly Monopoly session by folding her hands in a motherly fashion. It was a result of Lottie’s questioning about the kidnappings going off rails and Louis doing little to stop her.

Jay dusted biscuit crumbs from her fingertips. Some of them spilled onto her dress.

“There haven’t been any new reports for the last three months,” she said.

Louis knew this story. He could tell this story in his sleep.

“I’m not saying that it makes things safer,” his mum continued, “But this way we’ll save time when I would’ve been out driving and I can, believe it or not, keep a better eye on you two. Lord knows what happened back home, with all those gangs.”

“But the snatchings have been going on since 2012, haven’t they?” Lottie said and seized the moment to toss out more of her green houses onto the board.

“It’s not just this town,” Jay said, as if it would lessen the danger in it, ”It’s all over the county. It was close to home.”

Head in his hand, Louis rolled the dice. The moment he stepped onto Lottie’s street, she smacked her hand down by his face. She sported a wry smirk.

“It’s not like anything will happen to us,” Louis said whilst paying. “You wouldn’t have moved here if you weren’t certain. Besides, that’s not something that happens to people you know. Niall said so himself, sort of.”

“The only thing I’m certain of is that I don’t want you running around after dark,” Jay said and stood from the table. She neglected the dishes piling in the sink. “Come on now, otherwise we’ll be late.”

They had all managed to find proper attire, after a stressed and scream-filled forenoon rummaging around boxes, even the ones labelled _China_ and _Cables and co._ Louis had refrained from wearing a suit whereas the Tomlinson women insisted on dresses they hadn’t been allowed to wear previously because of the rainy summer.

They barely made it off the porch and out into the drizzle. A van rolled into the neighbour’s empty driveway.

“Who’s that?” Jay said into the air.

“It was here this morning as well.” Lottie gestured to the single pile of boxes by the neighbours’ front door. “I figured it was just more of our stuff.”

A man in his fifties stepped out of the car, head to toe in black, and skipped right up to the door. He hoisted the boxes onto his hip and unlocked the door. Mellow voices greeted him and Louis could just make out the shape of a woman inside, cheap jewellery adorning her neck and bust. The door shut.

“Okay,” Louis said, “So neighbours that aren’t Mr and Mrs Horan. Why are you looking so puzzled?”

Jay’s eyebrows unknotted and she fumbled for something in her purse.

“I was just positive…” She paused, shook her head. “Never mind. Where do we go?”

Louis checked his phone as they marched, all huddled under one umbrella. Niall had texted him earlier with a promise of information—how he would recognise _Liz_ and _Zaf_ and directions to the civic hall. His mum had been in town for weeks, house-hunting and sightseeing, but her sense of direction remained horrid.

The world, damp and flourishing around them, wheezed its last breaths of summer. Lottie picked sullen roses from bushes they passed, using a leftover bobby pin to fasten one in her hair. She twirled the stalk between her fingers. Louis was busy kicking gravel and cursing Niall’s ambiguous directions.

Despite the town’s small size, cars lined the street of the civic hall on both sides. People emerged from cars slanted down the pavement in a variety of high heels and combat boots, boleros and grand coats that swept behind them.

Previously confident in his choice of clothing, Louis deflated.

“Be glad you’re not wearing a suit,” Lottie said, walking on her tiptoes to reach his ear. “Old people need to dress up, not the other way around.”

They passed through a buzzing hall. A large board hung on the wall with messy handprints made by the kids at nursery school. Proud parents stood in front of it, clutching their purses and the hands of their children, discussing with other families. The handprints formed a giant heart.

Round tables scattered the dining hall. Banners hung above the stage in the far end of the room, saying _Bring them home,_ and below them stood the buffet promised in the invite.

Niall stood up front with his family, chatting to a guy his age who wore a tense expression. When the Tomlinsons entered the hall he perked up and dragged his mate across the room.

Louis’ stomach knotted upon seeing their slacks and polished shoes.

“Hey handsome,” Niall said, “May I introduce Liz, my rock.”

The guy gave a strained smile and shook Louis’ hand.

“It’s Liam,” he said.

Niall averted his attention to the two women ogling them. Lottie inspected her nails.

“Can I borrow your son for a while?”

Jay gave him a disoriented nod, holding her daughter’s shoulder as they shuffled through the crowd.

And so Louis was dragged off in a new direction entirely, towards the recess where the kitchen lay. A man leaned against the wall, writing feverishly in a worn journal. He stuffed it away when they neared and as he looked at them Louis realised he must be the same age as the rest of them. A bundled jacket peeked from under his arm.

“Aren’t you supposed to be up there?” he said and straightened up.

“The stage is thirty feet away at most,” Niall said. “I think we’ll be okay.”

“And that’s your new neighbour.”

“Ah, indeed.” Niall pushed Louis ahead. “Louis Tomlinson. His family’s here as well.”

“You live in the puke-coloured house,” the guy said.

So this was a _thing?_ Louis had never felt more out of place. The three of them probably had a ton of inside jokes up their sleeves, just waiting to smack him in the face. Being alone with Niall on the roof had felt so much better.

“And you don’t,” Louis said. He peered at the journal and the name enshrined in the leather.

_Zayn J Malik._

The guy nodded towards the clutter of tables. “So who are they?”

They all turned heads.

The man in black and his wife stood by their seats with two teenagers. Their daughter sported braids like a halo while the rest of her lilac hair billowed down her backless dress, whereas their son wore a scowl. Cheap jewellery hung around the mother’s neck.

“I recognise him,” Louis said. “I think they’re moving in next door.”

Liam scoffed. “You’re shitting us.”

Louis turned back to see that Niall had blanched.

“Why would I do that?” he said.

Liam was too busy ogling the family to answer.

Popping his journal back open, Zayn started scribbling. “No one ever moves into Sunny,” he said, almost sighing. “Or out.”

Louis chuckled. “Isn’t that ominous.”

He accidentally locked eyes with the son.

Niall couldn’t tear his eyes from them. Louis wondered if he’d even breathed since sighting them.

“I’ll find out about them, if you want,” he said. “We’re neighbours, it’s bound to happen.”

Niall patted his shoulder. Just the simple touch was soothing.

“I’d be grateful,” he said, then took off towards the stage.

Liam was about to follow but spun back to Zayn.

“Any clue when Doniya will get here?”

Zayn avoided his stare. “Go.”

As Liam left, Louis searched the crowd for his family. They sat only a table away from the new neighbours. Without any shame, Lottie stared at the daughter’s hair and touched the flowers woven into her own.

The susurrations settled down as a microphone was brought up on the stage. Louis attempted to re-join his family. Zayn pulled him back with a shake of his head.

Mr Horan spoke.

“In support of the recent atrocities here in Sunny, we’re here to help fund local authorities in their pursuit of finding the perpetrators. Here with us to speak for the cause is Chief Moss himself.”

Polite applause rumbled in the hall and settled when a gaunt man stepped on stage.

Zayn swept hair from his face. “So, are you his lapdog or something?”

Louis had seen this type of movie countless of times: new kid doesn’t fit town’s standards and is mistrusted until the final act where he swoops in and saves every ungrateful bastard who used to doubt him. Louis wasn’t fond of those movies.

“Just neighbours,” he said. “And we’re not shagging. I know you’re all suspicious about the ‘no one enters or leaves’ stuff but I’m not here for the kidnappings. So you can hop off my dick.”

Zayn glanced his way.

“I wasn’t trying to be a dick,” he said. “Niall just tends to over-socialise.”

Louis knew there wasn’t a thing such as exclusive friendships, but Niall had seemed so intrigued by him – that night on the roof and the day before. It only now occurred to him that there had been people before and there would be people after.

“I’m surprised you don’t have a nickname for him,” he said.

The two of them looked at the stage.

Whereas Liam surrounded himself with what looked to be his older sisters, Niall stood in centre, just to the right of the chief who shared painful anecdotes of his time as a kid growing up in Sunny. Nests of light tangled in his hair, subtly gelled-up, and the glow trickled down the casually elegant dress jacket he wore.

Mr Horan took his wife’s hand as Chief Moss stepped from the microphone.

“We would also like to express our personal gratitude towards the community,” he said and took a moment to breathe the attendants’ attention. “Greg’s passing inflicted pain on more than the three of us, yet all of your doors stood open for us. That’s precious. We cannot thank you enough.”

The polite applause started up for a brief second, more cordial now, and died down.

Louis knew someone in his position shouldn’t be asking, but he’d never controlled his impulses well.

“Did Niall have a brother?” he said.

With another shake of his head, Zayn poised a pen behind his ear and smacked up the journal. The buzz started up as the Paynes and the Horans stepped down and announced dinner.

“Guess you really aren’t mates,” he said and walked off to interview the guests.

Louis rolled his eyes. He watched Niall stroll between tables, making sure everyone enjoyed the evening and gestured towards the row of objects and experiences to bid on at the far end of the room. Some of the attendants left their empty plates while the dining queue thickened and crossed the hall to eye the offers.

Jay had stricken up conversation with the neighbours when Louis finally joined them. Neither the daughter nor the son participated. With how silent and isolated they were they might as well have been elsewhere entirely. Lottie kept glancing at the lilac dye.

“Oh, Louis,” Jay said once he sat. “You disappeared so we took care of your plate before the queue got too long.”

It was brimming with seabass and peculiar sauce.

“Thanks, mum.”

She resumed her position leaning over her backrest and picked up the threads of conversation.

She hung there for most of the evening. It got to the point where Lottie put down her phone and made small talk with the neighbours’ daughter, gesturing to each other’s flowers and braiding each other’s hair despite a significant age difference.

Louis swirled his fork around in fish bones, idly searching for Niall or anyone who’d want to talk to him. The two families got up together and walked over to survey the biddings, cash in hand. Only the son stayed put.

The two of them looked at each other, one table apart. Up close the bloke looked like he could be the lead in an underground indie band, with his wild hair and swollen tattoos. Louis tried not to stare at the ink.

The son thumbed his lips, clearly determined to win the quiet battle. Louis gave up and looked away. Their families strolled between attractions and made no sign to finish any time soon. Lottie barely reached above the daughter’s shoulders.

When Louis glanced back to see if the son could be as tall as his sister, he was still staring in a relaxed manner, like he was lost in thought. He had the decency to smile carefully when their gazes locked again. Louis wasn’t worried about the tattoos anymore.

And so, a voice to his right.

“Ready for dessert?” Jay said, sitting back down, and with her, the rest of both families.

Louis just raised his eyebrows in question and hoped she couldn’t detect the goofy look on his face.

“What are we bidding on?” he said in hopes of disguising himself.

“Two-hundred quid on a trip to the Maldives,” Lottie said then nodded to the other table. “They’re bidding two-fifty.”

Of course they were. Everyone in this town was extra.

His phone buzzed.

 

 **Niall:** _My part here is over and it’s always better to leave the party early. Want to come with?_

 

“Actually, mum, can I be excused?” Louis said just as Jay reached for his plate. “I’ve got a thing.”

“Oh, a _thing_.” She tried to peek at the screen. “Is it Niall? If it’s Niall, you can go. Just be responsible.”

With another glance at the boy next door, Louis excused himself and crossed the room to the entrance hall.

The childish hearts were unoccupied. He found himself skimming the bronze plate beneath for the name _Horan,_ his brows furrowing the further he went.

Swallowing a sigh, he stepped away. He already knew he was bad at detective work – his former teachers had told him as much – but he had still hoped he might find something. Niall probably wouldn’t have a brother that went to nursery school. Maybe the painting had been made after Greg’s death? Or he could have been Niall’s older brother?

As the thought crossed his mind, Niall dived out from the dining hall somewhat dishevelled. To Louis’ luck, neither Liam nor Zayn were with him.

Dusk had already dripped below the horizon when they emerged. They ventured to sights Louis had been introduced to only a few days prior during his first tour of Sunny, and Niall pointed out how they probably shouldn’t enter the barricaded arcade after dark.

Trees soughed in harmony with a neighbour’s muffled 80’s medley. A car rolled down a street some houses away. He couldn’t find any trace of the city influences he had grown up with, their rambunctious sense of comfort. Maybe he’d lived in that safety for so long that he had come to take it for granted, despite what his mum said about cities. Somehow he had managed to rediscover it here, in Niall’s reassuring words and eager guidance.

“Guess this is one of the perks about suburbs,” Louis said and peered up to the black skies, “Night strolls.”

Niall smiled. “I knew you would come around.”

When they reached their street, both their houses were vaguely lit. Someone watched late telly, someone else made a midnight snack. Niall beckoned him towards the Horans’ backyard.

Pieces of outdoor furniture claimed the only paved area in the lawn. Garden tools and a grimy motorcycle leaned against the fence framing the Horan residence. In front of it stood an old swing set. It barely creaked when they sank down.

“Mum’s hard on the maintenance,” Niall explained. “It takes a lot to win _Best Kept Town_ seven years in a row.”

“How do you even do that? Isn’t it a nation-wide competition?”

“Sure is.”

Louis made a mental note to scan houses for cobwebs and withered plants on his next daytrip.

They rocked back and forth on their swings until frost tickled their naked ankles and lights blackened inside their houses. Louis was on the cusp of asking about the second Horan son when Niall pointed out that it must be dawn in a few hours. Niall remained on his swing as they said their goodnights, watching Louis trying to sneak back to his room. He remained seated as Louis peered out from his bedroom window, slowly kicking himself back and forth.

 

✘

 

Zayn called Louis at noon.

Louis scrambled from his fort of pillows and duvets and stepped into an empty box labelled _Bathroom_ on his bedroom floor. Groaning, he fumbled for his phone and answered incoherently.

“ _Hey, Zayn here.”_

“How did…” Louis shook his head. “This is my number.”

“ _I got it from Niall, hope that’s all right. Listen, what did you two do yesterday?”_

Louis ran a hand down his face, letting it stick to his cheek. He could barely hear Zayn speaking.

“We’re not shagging,” he said.

“ _Just tell me what you did. Please.”_

“We just walked for a bit. Sat on some swings. We talked, is all.”

“ _Check his house. See if it’s empty.”_ Sensing Louis’ reluctance, Zayn added, _“I need you to do this.”_

With a murmured _hang on,_ Louis pulled on some shorts and somehow crawled into an old tee before heading across the hall.

Lottie sat cross-legged on her bed and stirred a bowl of yoghurt. Earphones dangled from her neck. She jumped when he entered.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“No cussing,” Louis said and grasped the window frame.

Two cars stood parked in the driveway, both familiar. No movement ruffled the curtains indoors, not a silhouette passed by the windows.

“It’s empty,” he said. “I mean, it’s dark, but their cars are still in the driveway.”

Zayn pondered the information. With a sigh, he thanked Louis and hung up.

Lottie was still staring.

Louis shrugged, tucking away his phone. This wasn’t how he preferred to wake up.

“Breakfast or lunch?” he said, pointing at his sister’s bowl.

“Lunch for you.”

She didn’t stop him when he slumped on her bed, grateful that her room was messier than his. Not only were there boxes, all half-unpacked, but used socks, plates and juice cartons lined desks and nightstands. His eyes fell on a beaten dollhouse peeking from one of the boxes.

Jay had bought it for Lottie’s ninth birthday, together with a set of figures that resembled the three of them. Lottie kept “accidentally” dropping the Louis figure for months, in mud and old cigarette butts. As a result, deep furrows in his head yielded the doll’s original beige nuance. Louis had made sure to pour glue over the Lottie doll’s hair in gratitude.

He skimmed his thumb across their doll family through a crack in the house, staring at the marks. Their mother had stopped making clothes for them after a year, so they still wore an early 2000’s collection.

The dolls stared back.

 

 


	2. Petrichor

_DON'T STRUGGLE LIKE THAT, I WILL ONLY WANT YOU MORE_

* * *

 

Louis wasn’t a worrier. He hadn’t been anxious when it was announced that they would relocate to Sunny Hills, a breach in Northern England’s countryside, far away from any kind of proper civilisation. Unlike his sister, he hadn’t been picky with which belongings to savour when Jay dumped moving boxes in their rooms, not second-guessing himself whether they would be useful in the future or not.

The thing was, Niall hadn’t contacted him since their night in the Horans’ backyard. Mr and Mrs Horan hadn’t accepted Jay’s invitation for picnic in Peak Park (the only location Louis hadn’t visited on his private tour of Sunny) and no one had left or entered the Horan residence.

There had been no impromptu home visits from bodyguards Liz and Zaf. It was as if the entire town had gotten over the buzz of new inhabitants and gone back to their idyllic existence, ignoring the Tomlinson family. After all, they must be old news by now.

As Louis sat in the kitchen, listening to his mum talking about the local school and watching Lottie tapping away on her phone, he saw his first glimpse of life in days. Zayn whirred past on a bike with his head high and eyes trained ahead. A rock weighed down the flyers stacked in his basket. In his wake, Louis saw one of the flyers taped to a lamppost and the family of three smiling below a bold title.

_Missing._

When the bike disappeared out of Louis’ sight, his gaze landed on the adjacent house. Hortensia and hyacinth webbed around the porch railing, which was as white as the nooks of the roof. Through the agape kitchen window, he heard the dying breaths of a windlass. It didn’t look like anyone had ever lived there, despite the two cars still rolled up in the driveway.

Instead of dwelling, he leaned over to Lottie, making it clear that he was obnoxiously eyeing her phone.

“Made some new friends?” he asked.

Her smile was unexpected.

“Waliyha. She’s Zayn’s sister.”

“How do you know who Zayn is?”

“They’re siblings. How _couldn’t_ I know? Besides, you sort of waved your phone in my face after you’d talked. What’s going on _there_ , is what I’d like to know.”

“ _Mum,_ ” Louis said and pushed his palms flat to the table, rocking back on his chair.

“I thought we could invite the Styles over for a barbecue,” Jay said without looking back at them, up to her wrists in soap and saucepans. “There is a sale at Homebase and I’ve been looking up some great recipes for ribs and zucchini, and it would be a great opportunity to welcome—“

Louis interrupted her, “Who?”

“ _Zucchini?_ ” Lottie said, then turned to her brother with a grimace. “Where _were_ you even at dinner?”

Louis raised his hands in surrender.

“The Styles,” Jay said, “They’re our neighbours. They just moved here from…” She paused. Foam dribbled from the spatula in her hand. “I have no idea. Would be a lovely gesture though, don’t you think? I don’t they’ve had the welcome we had, and Lottie I’m sure Gemma would want to braid your hair.”

Lottie’s eyes lit up, even left her phone screen. She kept from blabbering and just nodded, lips furled into her mouth.

“So it is.” Jay shut the tap off and dried her hands, reaching for her purse while rolling down her sleeves. “I’ll pop by Homebase and invite them over for this evening. Louis, I need you to go grocery shopping—there’s a list on the counter. Do you know your way to the store?”

 

✘

 

It was a tiny thing, shoved between a café and a garage and held just enough room for a narrow deli aisle and a, at best, limited assortment of ice-cream.

The Horan family smiled at the town from every corner of it. Stores were no exception. The AC made the flyers dog-eared and, as the paper rattled, the family seemed to laugh. Louis couldn’t help but sweep past seniors frolicking in the sun with their grandkids looping around them, hoping he would see a streak of beach blond hair in the shadows. People scowled as he passed by but soon returned to watering petunias and pouring lemonade.

It was easier to think that Niall would be hiding away rather than being missing. Louis couldn’t imagine anything else than that, especially not when they had spent Niall’s last night talking until the frost came.

Although, Louis hadn’t been much better when they left the city. With two days to spare he had spilt the beans of the future and that it was unlikely for Jay to consider moving back once her project was over. It wasn’t as if he had any close friends; they had all moved before growing up became a fact rather than a fantasy. No one had left him messages and he hadn’t contacted anyone.

To his surprise, the cashier didn’t gawk at him as he entered. She was busy discussing something with the only other person in the store; a middle-aged woman fanning herself with a rolled-up magazine. Louis looked down at his own attire—his dad’s old tee with coffee stains and tears in the collar—and dived into the aisles.

Printed prices had been replaced with scribbled ones—some even colourful—for a temporary sale and he had to squint to see anything. He hadn’t been able to get a cart since the woman refused to move, too caught up in talking, so he had to bundle everything up in the extensive fabric of his tee.

A lanky guy his age was wiping down the floor in the last aisle. Louis met his gaze and watched the earbuds propped into his ears. The guy just continued wiping.

With groceries pressed to his chest, Louis pressed his palms to the ice-cream box and examined its contents. He didn’t hear anyone enter the store, or shoes squeaking over the wet linoleum. Someone yanked him up and thrust him into a shelf, scattering his groceries by his feet. It was the old-fashioned kind of shove, the hands-bundling-the-collar type of thing.

Liam stared at him, disengaging his choke-hold a smidge.

“Lord,” a voice said, “Put him down. Take it easy.”

Louis did his best to keep footing as Liam unceremoniously dropped him. Yet he stumbled back and grappled for racks, watching Zayn shake his head behind Liam. Louis ran a quick hand through his hair. He didn’t have anything on Liam’s height or muscles.

“I did what you asked,” Louis said, nodding towards Zayn’s bistre figure. “He wasn’t home. No one was.”

Liam spun around. “You asked _him?_ ”

Zayn didn’t answer.

“Can you just stop it with the suspiciousness?” Louis said, fingers firmly curled around the racks behind him. “This isn’t an episode of _Midsomer Murders_.”

“Like you _knew_ him. I grew up with him, helped funding his first motorcycle, ran off in the woods with him, and he spends his last night with _you,_ a city brat? Why would he do that unless you had something to do with his disappearance?”

Keeping his voice quiet, Louis raised his hands. “I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot, but I didn’t move here to snatch anyone, and certainly not Niall. I want to find him as much as you do, and the rest of his family.”

“I doubt that,” Liam said and stepped forward.

“Liam.”

Zayn stood, placing a hand on his shoulder.

Liam flinched and withdrew.

“Fine if you won’t try finding him,” he said, body quivering in strain while he eyed Zayn, “But I’ll do whatever it takes. Someone needs to be there for him. What have you done for him, except hogging his dad?”

Zayn’s face remained impassive.

A squeak of newly bought shoes on wet floor interrupted them. A bag of apples dangled from the bloke’s fingers as he made his way around the corner, wide eyes uncovered when he brushed aside the veil of rampant curls. He crouched to the scattered groceries. Tattooed fingers meandered around of a flask of marinade.

Liam shrugged past him, ignoring the wet floor sign, and the easy tinkle of a bell soon announced his departure.

“Sorry for his… questionable methods,” Zayn said, gesturing towards the door. “I apologise on his behalf.”

“What about _your_ behalf?”

Zayn shrugged, kicking a pack of entrecote towards him. “I don’t think you did it. I have nothing to apologise for.”

He chose the open aisle to their left, grabbing a random magazine from the stand by the counter and chatted to the cashier. Light fell upon the gravelled doormat when he exited. The AC shut off and the dry summer forced its way indoors and rustled the before the door closed.

The tattooed bloke stood up and, cradling as many of the groceries as possible, treaded forward over the slick linoleum. Louis laded himself with them and felt them teeter.

“One moment,” his neighbour said and lunged towards the front of the store. He returned a second and helped Louis pack it all in a bag. He then crouched to gather the rest.

“We’re neighbours,” Louis said.

The guy smiled, tilted his head back to the groceries. “Yeah, I know. We’re invited over for a barbecue, apparently.” Looping his fingers into one of the handles, he helped holding the bag as it dipped with the weight. “I’m Harry.”

“Louis, very grateful for your help.”

They walked up like that to the counter, bag bopping. Harry would have forgotten his own groceries if the cashier hadn’t hollered at him halfway out the door. While he paid, Louis basked in the sun outside, eyeing the adjacent café. In sharp contrast to the desolate streets, people spilled over the outdoor seats. The tinkling of iced coffee wafted over to where Louis stood and he watched a waitress exit with a plethora of sticky ice-cream cones and fruit.

The veil of curls fell back over his eyes, and he pushed it back by habit. Tiny zits adorned his jawline.

“You know they have excellent brownies over there?” Louis said with a nod. “I haven’t tried them, actually, but rumour has it.”

Harry was already hovering along the pavement. “I was thinking of heading there myself. The barbecue’s not yet for a few hours, right?”

“Mum will want to serve cucumber water first, or something along those lines, so I doubt she’ll have started whenever we’re back. Can your folks barbecue?”

“They’ve had a… limited amount of experience.”

One of the _Missing_ flyers framed the café door and Louis came face to face with Niall’s dead eyes. Harry pressed it open without stalling.

At the edge of the shadowy room lay a brilliant display. Icing in a colourful spectrum coated pastries and cakes and a hand-crafted bowl stood on the counter, bearing fresh strawberries and peaches. Someone had pierced the largest peach with a miniature umbrella. It was significantly less crowded indoors.

While they bought their brownies, Louis spotted a deserted bench where Sunny Hills breached the woods and pointed towards it.

“It’s too hot here,” Louis said when they settled down. “I figured it would be cooler out here than in the city, but it’s just another kind of stickiness.”

Harry sprawled out over the bench with the half-eaten brownie sitting between them, its jagged edges glimmering in the afternoon sunshine. He bathed in the heat.

“You’re tan though,” he said.

Louis had to examine himself, then watched Harry. His skin was a handful of shades darker than the white bench.

“I didn’t save you or anything, did I?” Harry said, cracking an eye open. “Who were they?”

“You know Niall Horan, right?”

“We talked at dinner, he came up to our table.”

“Those two are his bodyguards and they think I know where he is. Dead-set on it. One of them does, anyway.”

“Haven’t you just moved here?”

“Apparently that doesn’t count. I have a feeling he won’t let it go until Niall shows up again.”

Clouds drifted over the sun, offering Harry to look at Louis without lidded eyes. His arms slid off the backrest and hands knotted before him as he leaned forward. Bewildered, he spoke slowly, leg jumping.

“Are you even sure he’s missing? It’s only been a few hours.”

Louis had to shrug. He still expected Niall to jump out of the nearest bush with a bottle of nicked cheap beer, maybe propose a midnight get-together in the old arcade.

“Maybe he gets a kick out of it,” he said. “It’s just odd. We talked about this a few nights ago and he said that you couldn’t help but knowing everyone in a town like this, but everyone knows him. Just look at the flyers—they’re everywhere. It’s just hard to believe that he’s vanished with this kind of attention.”

“So you were close?”

After a while, Louis shook his head.

“He spent his last night here with me. That pissed Liam off. And now he has this grudge towards me or something—I’m not familiar with his life story.”

He thought about Niall’s words at the charity dinner. He had wanted Louis to investigate Harry and his folks—not assigned one of his bodyguards the mission. Something had happened on that roof that he couldn’t explain. That something made his chest wrench with each glance to the _Missing_ flyers.

Harry let him delve into thought, and when Louis breached the haze the boy was neatly folding the thin cast once coating their brownies. It practically floated between his fingertips. Despite shadows tickling his eyelashes and cheekbones, his mouth remained soft while shaping muted lyrics to a song only known to him.

“Have you ever been in trouble?” Louis asked. “Proper trouble, like getting arrested.”

The lyrics faded and Harry lifted his hand. The cast had formed into a simple flower tucked into his palm. Instead of bragging about it, he smiled to himself and put it on the bench.

“Not as bad as being accused of kidnapping. But you didn’t do it, right?”

“Of course I didn’t.”

Harry nodded. “Of course.” The paper rose crumpled in his hands as he picked it back up, rearranging it as he spoke. “Just small things. Broke my dad’s watch once. Actually, Gemma did, but you know. I couldn’t let her take the blame.”

“Heroic.” Louis sighed, kicking back to lounge in the sun. “Yeah, Lotts is the same. She’s the most annoying brat—you should see her room. We have the whole house cleaned up, at least dusted and with mostly empty boxes, but her domain is pure chaos. Super rebellious.”

“Little sister, right? Gemma loves her. She was afraid there wouldn’t be any other girls here. How old is she?”

“Turned eleven a few weeks back.” Louis lifted his eyebrows, as if just realising it, and said, “I’d still give my life for her. Siblings, yeah?”

Harry only stared at the withered paper rose.

“We should probably get back with these, huh?” Louis said and hoisted up his bag of groceries. “Has anyone guided you around town?”

 

✘

 

The tour was nothing compared to the full Sunny Hills experience. Louis could admit that. Still, Harry chimed in with comments and walked by Louis’ side, groceries knocking together while he pointed at things and shared trivia his parents had told him. The damp asphalt sharpened into a mirror as the suburbs opened up in sparse forest and rich golden fields by the horizon, so they took a detour to the old arcade where they ended up lingering.

Fungus-infested boards clung to doorways and windows. Glass shards glimmered in greens and yellows laced into the lawn, which had recently been mowed. Between the boards was a hole the size of an adult crouching, through you could see the gaping darkness within the hovel. A battered neon sign braced above the doorway as a reminder of the arcade’s former glory.

Louis wondered how this had contributed to seven years of shouldering the title _Best Kept Town_.

“Have you been inside?” Harry asked.

“I’ve been trying to steer clear of stupid decisions,” Louis said and recalled how Niall had urged him close enough to taste the chipped paint on the wood. They had treaded over the hazardous lawn and shared ideas for post-apocalyptic purposes the building could serve and Niall had talked about his adventures inside, spurring an insatiable need within Louis to live out the memories.

“That said,” Louis continued and raked his eyes across the glossy metal hinges, “I’ve been dying to go inside, but I’m kinda creeped out. If there was any haunted house in Sunny, it would be this place.”

Harry gurgled. “No haunted houses, please. I’d rather have dinner with you.”

“We’re moving fast forward here, Harry.”

“Oh yes, my parents are dying to meet you.”

Louis chuckled, shook his head. “One day you’ll have to tell me what these mean.” He gestured to the jagged sleeve of ink on Harry’s arm.

“At least wait till the third date ‘till we get into backstories.”

“Right,” Louis said as they stepped onto their street. Smoke billowed from the Tomlinsons’ backyard. “How indecent am I?”

When they arrived, Mr and Mrs Styles stood with a glass of cucumber water in hand while Jay slaved by the grill, preparing the zucchini and halloumi. Gemma sat on the steps of the patio with a straw between her teeth while Lottie wheeled before her. The breeze carried the blossoms on her dress, similar to those tangled in her hair. As they stepped onto the lawn, Louis could see that his sister had mimicked the décor.

“Louis!” Jay came towards them, muttering blesses to God whilst yanking the groceries from her son’s hand. “It’s been hours, where—“ She spotted Harry, who raised his hand in tentative greeting. “Ah, no worries. Just put the rest of this in the fridge, will you?”

Passing by their sisters, Louis stopped at the top of the stairs when Harry fell away from his side. The boy crouched by Gemma, whispering something, and she let him take a hearty sip of lemonade. He pulled her in for a hug.

Louis toed off his low shoes and went inside. The newly installed ceiling fan whizzed in the living room and ruined the sweat-combed bird nest that was his hair. Slick clicks came from his soles as they parted from the chill tiles, like the rip of stickers. Beyond the buzz of his refrigerator, he heard Lottie squealing and a man’s gnarled laugh pierce the air. Louis assumed it must be Mr Styles’, since Harry’s voice was far rounder around the edges.

On his way out, he ruffled his hair into style.

The sweet scent of honey-glazed steak permeated the garden. Louis leaned in the doorway to inhale it, arms crossed and stomach lurching. Lottie now perched next to Gemma, fingering her hair. Both girls cackled when Harry failed doing cartwheels on the grass. Despite the grass stains on his shorts, Harry only wiped his scraped-up elbows and laughed.

“Louis! Louis!” Lottie hollered when she saw him in the windows. “You have to try!”

Even Gemma turned to him with her gracious smile.

Louis held his hands up and marched down the stairs to where Harry sat with earth-ingrained nails. Something in Harry’s eyes seemed to mock him, egg him on towards failure. The sun beat down on his palms where they rose to the blushing skies.

Louis lined himself up…

“Are you serious?” Harry said.

… And wheeled.

Facing one side, he dipped down, let the damp grass flourish between his fingertips, and the straws of evening light cut into his eyes when he reared back up and dusted off his hands.

“I played footie for eight years,” he said and bowed.

Harry was sceptical.

“’Cause that’s what they teach you on the team.”

“I was one of the best. Feel free to challenge me on that, Styles.”

That stirred something inside of the bloke and he deflated.

“I was never taught that.”

Louis cooed and slung an arm around his shoulder while they headed for the edge of the garden, where the previous owners had constructed benches and a small pond with cobbled décor. Frogs hopped about in the water.

On the stairs, Lottie was bragging about her brother while weaving more flowers into her hair—fiery crocuses and tiny forget-me-nots. Gemma didn’t seem to mind the boast.

Jay, one of her hands in an oven mitten and the apron around her waist flecked with marinade, summoned them to dinner.

Walking back to their families, Louis leaned into Harry—trying to level with him—and said, “So you play?” And Harry shrugged, saying that he had played for a few years as a kid but had to quit due to a knee injury. Louis gazed down at the bony cups while joining the table.

“We could just play for fun sometime,” he said. “I haven’t been out in the field for some time, so you should be fine. There are some great lawns here in town.”

Harry stuffed his mouth full with steak and to prolong his answer. To Louis’ dismay, he swallowed with a frown.

“Not too sure I’d want to,” he said, a dry chuckle leaving his throat as if on accident. “You’d probably destroy me again. And I don’t know about my knee. It might just… break, or something.”

“Harry, it sounds lovely.”

It was the first sentence Louis had witnessed leaving her mouth. She reminded him of a girl he went to school with, two years older, who was nothing short of ethereal. The girl seemingly drifted across gravel and rubble whereas her peers would trudge on, occasionally kick their toes. No matter one’s opinion of her, there was no denying she was something peculiar.

At the same time there was something brittle about Gemma, the way a runnel of blood made its way from a loose hangnail and pooled in the crevices of her thumb. It threatened to spill onto her dress.

“Don’t bite your nails, darling.”

Mrs Styles had her lips pressed to the rim of her wine glass, scrutinising her daughter. A pair of glasses with leopard-patterned frame tipped on her ample nose.

Gemma sucked the blood from her lip. It left a faded mark in her mauve lipstick. It reminded Louis of a puppet show where all strings had been exposed for the audience. A tiny yet fatal slip.

While the entire table, sans Mr and Mrs Styles, attempted to sway Harry, Louis received a phone call. Without anyone’s eyes on him, he snuck off inside.

Greasy fingerprints smeared across the massive windows delimiting the patio. Louis squeezed his eyes shut, praying his mum would be locked at dinner until he had swiped it off. When he tipped his head up, his forehead had left similar, dryer prints on the glass.

“ _Louis Tomlinson.”_

Louis recognised Zayn’s modulated tone.

“I’m sorry, now’s not a good time to assault me. The Styles are here for a barbecue and I’m pretty drained.”

“ _Is Harry there?”_

“Harry is most definitely here.” Before Zayn could cut in with his suburban suspicions about death and suffering, Louis sighed and added, “He seems fine to me. We did cartwheels on my lawn.”

“ _As long as you’re watching him. That’s what Niall would’ve wanted.”_

Louis held the phone from his mouth so he could groan in solitude.

Outside, they seemed to have left the topic of footie, for Jay served another round of lemonade for everyone gathered and Mr Styles gestured to the bottle of wine. Gemma’s broad grin equalled her brother’s.

Louis headed farther inside. Wads of hair sprouted between the hand in his hair.

“How can you be sure that he’s missing? I’m not opposing the idea of searching for him — I’d be an idiot if I that after all the work you’ve put in so far — I just want to know if you’re sure it’s another kidnapping.”

“ _He’s missing until we find him, isn’t he? It frankly doesn’t matter if he’s been abducted or not, although I’m convinced that’s the case. It all adds up.”_

“Then tell me what I can do for him.”

In the background, a pencil skated across flimsy paper, the kind that ruffled if you didn’t pin it down. Zayn tapped his fingers to a solid surface, clicked the pencil a few times, before the creak of an office chair signalled him leaning back.

“ _All of us are heading out in a few days. Our sisters included. I’ve been talking to his acquaintances to see which areas we should prioritize.”_

“’Acquaintances’. Isn’t he the local celebrity?”

“ _I’ve only checked the ones deemed fit for questioning—the ones that actually know a damn about him. Louis, I know how to do my job.”_

“Should I bow, Mr Detective?”

“ _I’ve planned a route, or several, depending on the time we have, around Sunny and its vicinity. We’re planning on being out all day. Bring lunch.”_

“I’ll bring sneakers and a rucksack of surveillance equipment.” Louis bit back the caustic tone. “Seriously, though. I want to find him. It’s all I can think about, I swear. I can’t imagine what it must be like for the rest of you who, well… For all of you who actually knew him.”

The line had been silent for so long that Louis hovered his thumb above the _end call_ button, contemplating a painless way out. He was surprised by the relief that flooded him when Zayn didn’t hang up on him.

“ _Hey. We were out of line today, Liam and I. But like I said, I don’t think you did it. I just hope you can convince Liam as well. It’s good to have you on board. You want to know something though?”_

“I’m an avid listener.”

Zayn took a moment to assemble his thoughts.

“ _I needed to confirm,”_ he said, _“What you’d told me about Niall’s house, of course. So I swung by there earlier to see for myself. The cars were still there, but everything had been wiped clean. No smeared handprints on the windows or handles, the driveway had been swept and the lawn mowed. Whoever is doing this is not picking their victims at random. The Horans have been targeted for a long time.”_

 


	3. Dearest dreadful darling

_SWEET HARMONY, SEND US OUT WITH NOWHERE TO GO_

* * *

 

In preparation for the forthcoming Wednesday, Louis had spent the evenings on his own, darting around Sunny Hills to find its hidden nooks, anyplace Zayn and Liam could want to ransack. Among his findings was a broad path into the woods, just around the northern corner of his street, which was littered with pine needles and cones. It was as much of a surprise each time one of them ended up beneath shoes and socks. Several times he had stopped only to see flecks of blood appearing in the white cotton. After that day he made sure to come better prepared.

He’d carried a rucksack with him, containing water bottles, sunglasses, another set of footwear and sweats, and due to the treacherous weather, he had also knotted a sweater around his waist. Unlike Master Detective Zayn, he didn’t have a notebook to make observances in, hence he memorised the area best he could so that he would offer clever suggestions. If the bodyguards kept any known information from him just because they were suspicious of him, they wouldn’t shower him with hospitality even once Niall was found. His race would be finished. He needed to ingratiate himself with them and all odds were currently set against him.

Another detour had guided him around the Hills editorial office, a highly fashionable block amidst the aged suburbia. Photographs of the Horans littered the entrance, both taped to the windows and framed on the doorstep. Many of them depicted only Mr Horan. The memorial sported flowers in different stages of decay.

In the aftermath of one of his earlier expeditions, Louis had crashed at the pizza parlour and occupied a booth with his packing. Most residents lounged in the so he was left alone indoors with his mental notes about locations and details. They had soon fallen away when dinner arrived.

Chin coated in cheese and tomato sauce, Louis had jumped as Harry entered the parlour, oblivious to his existence and with droopy eyes. Although Louis had planned to be back before dusk, he had called Harry over, offering up pizza, and soon they were both flicking onions and olives from the golden dough. Come closing hours, staff had to shoo them out in the bistre night to wipe tables, and Louis’ body had been itching in the desolate streets they walked. He was back on the rooftop with Niall.

Louis had asked Zayn if Harry could join them on the search—using the argument that they would be able to keep a better watch over him if he was nearby—but Zayn had scoffed at the thought, saying it was bad enough one of the newcomers accompanied them, _“no offense”_. Liam would be hostile, he had said, maybe even call of the entire search.

As Louis approached the school, seeing Zayn perched on the hood of a car with his feet on the tire, and Liam squaring the main entrance, he wondered if he should have pressed the suggestion harder. With Harry there would be one friendly face present.

Backpack tight to his spine and his thumb hooked in its strap, he searched for a pause in Lottie’s rambling. He found it when she saw Zayn gracing the car ahead.

“So, are you two friends now? You talk a lot on the phone and there’s _clearly_ tension there—“

“Lotts—“

“—And maybe something’s going on with that other bloke, he seems tense. I mean, I see why he’d be tense—“

Louis patted her shoulder and diverted his gaze from the arctic duo. “Mum’s gonna work late a few nights this week, so I was thinking we could binge R-rated movies and order really greasy take-out?”

Lottie’s head pivoted from the bodyguards. A streak of acknowledgement flashed over her face, as if she was surprised to be treated as a teenager but didn’t want to wield it.

“Saw,” she said. “I want to watch Saw.”

Louis shook his head, burking a groan. “You’re- We’re not seeing Saw. You’re too mainstream. You’re a disgrace to—“

“We’re sure not watching more of your low-budget rolls!”

“It’s not low-budget—it’s indie. Way different.”

They arrived at the entrance and Lottie hummed, passing through the open door only to halt when Louis didn’t follow. She peered up at the two men.

“Go on,” Louis encouraged, even beckoned her forward with a small nod. The straps of his rucksack tightened in his fist while a kind of eager tension filled him. He would finally be able to walk from the side-lines and act.

Zayn slipped from the hood to join him, smeared notes bundled in hand, and turned to Lottie who still swayed in the doorway.

“Waliyha’s waiting for you,” he said.

Once she was inside, Liam let the door go. It left them alone in the parking lot, where overfull bins and piled gravel on the asphalt spoke of the community’s environmental commitment. Louis thought of the glass shards by the arcade. Next to the main entrance hung a metal sign with the school’s logo. From the nearby canteen wafted a hearty smell of roasted potatoes.

While nearing them, Liam smacked his hands together in that overly masculine way one does before squaring one’s opponent in the jowl. Louis found himself rubbing his chin.

“Just the three of us today,” Liam said. “Are you prepared?”

Zayn handed over one of the maps. It was one of the cleaner ones with only the edges of the forest smeared.

Louis raked his eyes over the areas—most he had already visited during his explorations. The map faded out in white beyond the closed-off railway to the east.

“Thought you would bring the whole company,” he said and slowly raised his gaze, narrowing in on Liam. “Sisters and all.”

“They got held up.”

“Doniya as well,” Zayn butted in. “She would’ve been distracting.”

Liam swallowed a scoff. On his way inside he flicked a piece of grime off the school’s logo.

Zayn made an effort to move in after but Louis pulled him back, gesturing to the map.

“One question though.”

Zayn nodded.

“So why is it that the police don’t have any major leads yet? It’s been going on for three years now. Aren’t there any witnesses? Isn’t there anything to go on?”

“Four.”

Louis cocked an eyebrow.

“Four years,” Zayn clarified. With one hand on Louis’ upper back and the rucksack dangling by their side, they pressed inside. “I’ll give you the intel later. Also, you should know there are some rumours about your neighbours.”

Afraid to say anything, Louis waited for Zayn to elaborate. People eyed them with a sense of strange relief when they passed by, and Louis doubted it was because of his presence.

“Apparently Gemma is in the hospital.”

“Wow, yeah, great rumour—“

“That’s not the rumour. It’s true. Majority is thinking Harry had something to do with it, though.”

Louis tried to listen to the whispers of conversation around them, grappling for anything that could strengthen the claim. He’d have to make small-talk in class.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said, nose wrinkled. “They’re probably closer than you are to your sisters – or Liam to his. But it’s just the suspicion, innit? Always easy to single someone out and—“

“I’m not calling them out on anything, Louis. I know that you care for him so you should be prepared. Maybe you could talk to him.”

They didn’t have many classes together, but school had been easy on the both of them so far. They would lunch and people-watch together in the canteen and team up in French class. Harry’s pronunciation was horrid, no doubt about it, but he made up for it with forced puns and a goofy smile. After all, Louis didn’t mind doing most of the work. Once they had even been invited to join members of the student council during break, all eager to listen to them – not in any form of interrogation like Louis had faced at the grocer’s shop.

And now their peers were using Harry as their scapegoat.

Louis didn’t hear the rumours until third period.

No one knew the cause of Gemma’s hospitalisation, from what he could tell, and he hadn’t. Louis hadn’t crossed paths with Harry in the halls that day, and given how the whispers ramped up into theories of murder attempts and intricate background stories featuring them as fugitive criminals, Louis doubted he had come at all.

Next to him sat an older girl, diligently taking notes paired with doodles of birds. Her chin was rounded and her eyes bright chestnut, sharp where they swept across the letters which all lined up in neat, italicised blocks. The birds twirled under her touch.

Once the teacher gave up preaching, she assessed her work, and Louis leaned over.

“I heard something happened to Gemma,” he said. “Not to be disrespectful, just wondered if you could shed some light on it.”

The girl tapped the butt of the pen to her lips before sliding it behind her ear, the same way Zayn would.

“None,” she said with a shrug. “You’re Louis. You hang out with her brother, yeah?”

Louis tried to recall if he’d skimmed across her name in a catalogue, or been introduced to her in passing. She was painfully familiar somehow.

“I’m sorry,” he said with a shake of his head, finger pressed to his mouth, “You’re too old for me. Who are you?”

Her eyebrow quirked in dry amusement.

“It’s Doniya.”

“Oh.” He wanted to smack himself. “Doniya Malik?”

“The one and only.”

Plucking the pen from its clutch, she poised it over the paper for a while in thought. “You should talk to him about it, if you’re as close as you seem. He should know.”

There was something about the Maliks being delicately hostile that Louis couldn’t put his finger on.

Just then he glanced to the hallway. A cluster of curls and tattoos coasted by.

The teacher was too deep in to notice Louis flinging out of his chair.

“Hey!”

Harry spun around but kept walking. Louis jogged up to him. They stood for a bit, Harry toying with a marine tee of a flimsy fabric and Louis examining the discreet bruise where jaw and ear joined. The thumbprint was small enough to go unnoticed by the untrained eye, but on Harry’s skin it lit up.

Finally Harry sighed and held the tee up. It unfurled, displaying his surname and a number.

“I got in on the footie team,” he said. Below his sombre façade, shy streaks of joy surfaced, asking Louis’ permission to bloom.

“Well now you _have_ to practise with me,” Louis said and took it from his hands.

“Aren’t you free this afternoon?”

“That’s when the bodyguards and I are going Horan-hunting.”

The smooth touch of polyester made Louis want to press his nose to it, inhale the parched earth and gravel, but he sprained against the impulse. The tee slid over his palm. He could see Harry’s hands twitch as the harrowing clock down the hall urged them on.

The moment Harry held the tee again, he made an effort to leave.

“Gemma…”

Gaze straying from Louis’ face, Harry nodded along the corridor. Whereas he veered around the cluster of benches they reached on their walk, Louis perched on the backrest with his hands clasped. The clock beat on.

“I know you didn’t do anything,” Louis said.

Harry ransacked his pockets for something unattainable and lifted his face to the ceiling, unseeing.

“Rumours never settle down,” Louis explained. “Besides, you’re a proper footie player now, yeah? There isn’t a more prestigious role in the school. And no one there is a firm believer you’re a full-blooded serial-killer, are they?”

“Liam’s on the team.”

“Liam,” Louis said and seized Harry’s wrist, “Is a twat. Haven’t you seen how lost he seems without Niall? I’ll help you through this. Just gotta take out Liam and I’ve got Zayn covered already. He’s tepid.”

“They important?” Prying Louis’ fingers from his wrist, Harry leaned back to the wall, let the rucksack slide off. “More than anyone else, I mean.”

“Niall’s family is loaded, and the bodyguards are his wingmen. Don’t know what his mum’s doing but his dad’s working at the editorial office. The town is swarming with posters. If you win them over, you’ll fit right in with Sunny.” Louis softened his eyes. “Gemma will recover, won’t she?”

Harry nodded.

Louis didn’t press further.

Harry said, “Louis, I can’t stay here.”

“In Sunny?”

“In school. Today.”

“It’s quite a slaughter, innit? I hate to say this but that sounds wise.”

“My place is here in town. That’s the one thing I’m certain of.”

“Good, ‘cause I don’t reckon I’ll be leaving anytime soon.”

Someone in the deep end of the corridor entered a classroom with patters of heels. Harry stared towards the sound, features sharpening before he realised its source, by which he returned to Louis, chin bowed a few degrees.

“I should go.”

“Probably.”

But Harry didn’t leave. Louis cracked, shifting closer to see if he would flee, then hugged him.

His shoulders were slimmer than Louis had expected, as if he had skipped the second half of puberty. Undefined muscles glimpsed beneath the tattooed coat and in the windows behind, Louis saw his own fingers digging, avaricious.

Although often the first to dive into hugs and cheek-kisses, Louis wasn’t an intimate person. As a kid it had become routine to bundle up the comforter in his arms before bed and nuzzle against it and he wasn’t willing to break the habit. The sensation differed from embracing something living, making him wonder if it was a foreign pulse he felt or his own heartbeat.

Blunt nails ran across Harry’s spine when Louis let go, glancing up to find strands of his own hair dangling. He pushed them back. Harry adjusted his rucksack and tee. A light crust reddened his bleak features from the hug.

“It’s just one of those phases that won’t kill you,” Louis said. “Some gossip won’t ruin your life. I promise I’ll help you to the other side of things. Oh, and Lottie probably sends her regards. To Gemma.”

“Ah, yeah.”

Harry flashed one of his shy smiles as he left.

Louis wondered how he would fulfil the promise.

 

✘

 

Past noon, strips of mist and overhanging rain overthrew Sunny Hills. With each futile step, Louis’ stomach rumbled, and he wondered if they would have time to lunch. Liam sacked in his steps and revealed a defeated glint below his general dour, as if his plans had been utterly squandered and he had been forced to reschedule last minute.

Louis had spent early mornings filling himself in on the nature of the case and its foul details. Now he had minute descriptions in his head, the temporary fleeting kind akin the ones you gained when last-minute studying for an exam. For not only his own sake, or to soil Liam’s hostility, he wanted to impress Zayn with his commitment. Something about Zayn’s character made him want to perform well, even when the subject was difficult to him.

“Mr Detective,” he said, without harmful intentions as the coined term no longer made Zayn flinch or startled the scruffy Staedtler from his ear. “You said that Niall’s family had been targeted for a long time and therefore the perpetrator were not picking their victims randomly? That it’s personal this time?”

“It could be more than one perpetrator,” Zayn said, “Which is more likely, considering they haven’t left enough leads behind to get caught. It could be a single person is executing the abductions and multiple outer sources are sheltering and dusting over evidence.”

“A network, you’re saying?”

Zayn nodded.

“I was thinking…” Louis had to pause, wondering if he had swept over something between the lines, if Zayn would think he was foolish for suggesting it. Then he carried on, “Since the pattern doesn’t match, isn’t it possible whoever is responsible for Niall could be another person than _the_ kidnapper? Because whoever _the_ kidnapper is, they couldn’t have possibly chosen all those victims—they couldn’t all have been personal acts. Didn’t the range of the snatching spread down to Leeds?”

“Nottingham,” Zayn corrected.

They carried into the playground opposite the school, having taken the long way round the north of town—veering off by the bridge over the abandoned railway, neither Liam nor Zayn had seemed keen to explore that area.

As they stepped onto the gravel, the remains of a broken flask crackled underfoot, a mishap of the dutiful cleaning-police. Louis clutched his stomach in an attempt to silence its howls when they passed one of three playhouses scattered in the lawn. In spite of the bistre weather, gnats swarmed the air, and to join them, a swarm of wasps suckled on spilled soda on a bench. Gooseberry and birch saplings lined the foothill through which a slide trenched. No kids were in sight.

Liam’s sudden voice broke the silence, “Doniya is going to attend the self-defence classes, isn’t she?”

While ransacking the playground best he could, he stayed nearby, ears perked for an answer. Louis made sure to listen in as well.

Zayn said, “I couldn’t convince her so I made Waliyha her responsibility. Now they’re all going.”

“Safaa?”

“Not her,” Zayn said with discomfort. “I can’t fathom why they aren’t arranging classes for younger kids as well, now that children are being targeted.”

Louis cut in, unable to reserve himself, “Niall isn’t really a kid, though.”

By the way Zayn gained his composure, Louis could tell this was the wrong thing to say. The Staedtler quivered.

“In the eyes of the law,” Zayn said, and Liam had completely stopped searching, eyes flaring at Louis, “He is. And in the eyes of the community, he is.”

At the far end of the playground, beyond the trimmed lawn with its stainless football goals, two caretakers in marine Sunny Hills-logoed suits began coppicing stray scions. The drone of their chainsaws jarred through the mellow afternoon.

For once, Liam saved Louis from the impact, although unwittingly, asking, “How often a week is it? Thrice?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it is,” Zayn said. “It’s in the old library.”

“On the other side of town,” Liam said in disapproval—his brows shot together in a jagged wave and his posture sharpened, “Will anyone follow them there?

Zayn looked about to protest. “I’ll make do of something. Mum will be there, whenever she can. Otherwise I’ll solve it. Holly Round is one of the instructors.” This appeased Liam, so Zayn lead them past the playground border, towards Peak Park. “What about your sisters?”

“They’re held up.”

“There’s not just _one_ class—“

“Zayn, stop talking.”

Louis wondered what catches they had on each other. They needed to have some in order to maintain mates with this impenetrable tension. Whether the nature of their friendship with Niall had been of the same character, he couldn’t say. From the little he had seen them all interact, it was plausible. But Niall had seemed nothing but fond of them during his and Louis’ daytrips and sobering up in the mornings. Maybe it was all part of the idyllic Sunny Hills demeanour behind the curtains.

Louis couldn’t get over how picture-perfect everything was, even with soda-sticky benches and boarded-up arcades. The abductions only strung the town further together.

Now and then the sun cracked through the cloaked sky and speckled the path before them in light until its spears finally sank down on earth. It opened up into a pleasantly warm afternoon, a hint of summer fling for the lovelorn autumn.

Past a wall of sparse beeches, a grandiose park broadened, its paths lined with carnation, wild chervil, lone flax. In the midst of it, a lucid pyramid too small for its assigned attention.

Instead of love confessions on their trunks, artists had signed the ashy beech bark below their etchings. Mere sketches ranged to bodies with precise anatomy of people and towns—Louis soon concluded it was a map of Sunny Hills. Some had been graced with official plaques from the municipality.

When he noted they were pausing for lunch, he asked, “What’s up with the artistry?”

This time it was Liam who jumped at a reply, “Same origin as the board in the civic hall. Hand prints from the nursery.” Louis recalled the piece. “It gives the community something to do and be proud over.”

“I’m sure it contributes to being the _Best Kept Town_ ,” Louis said.

Scepticism dappled Liam’s face. Not the self-doubting kind, but more like he assessed whether or not the claim held a hidden meaning, if he should find it insulting. When the vacuous sheen reunited with the rest of Liam’s face, Louis supposed he decided against it.

Just then, Liam’s phone rang and he answered it and deviated from the path down the wooded flank of the steepest hill; below it a pond cut into the scenery.

By the foot of a plaintive fountain, Zayn dumped his bag. Unlike the marble figures Louis had acquainted in Doncaster, this had no gullies chipping away at the grubby exterior. Of course, it should have been to expect. The park, Louis found, was the centrepiece of town; the grand summary wiling people into buying Sunny Hills-branded products and brochures.

A flock of doves took flight from previously nesting on the marble statues. A lady wearing a hat thrice the size of her wrinkled skull packed down the bread she’d auctioned. Upon seeing Louis and Zayn she gave the latter a wave before starting towards the parking lot.

Between unwrapping a sticky eight-incher with oregano bread his mother had so proudly packed and eyeing Liam’s pacing shape by the pond, Louis asked, “What ages are the self-defence classes? Women only?”

“Oh, no,” Zayn said, cracking one of the cranberry biscuits Louis was sure Mrs Malik had packed for him. “Age restricted, yes, but only since toddlers and a few years above shouldn’t be left untended for, either way, there hasn’t been. I suppose they have to do with ‘don’t get into strange vans’ or not talking to people they don’t share lodging with.”

“So I could force my sister to go? She’s eleven.”

“Naturally.”

“Should I go?”

Zayn zipped his lips together as if he had tasted insects in the biscuit. “Maybe it _is_ for women only. Are you keeping an eye on Harry Styles?”

“More than you are.”

“Care to offer some intel?”

“First I want some confirmation about the rumours regarding his sister. Doniya said you’d know,” Louis said, because she hadn’t.

Zayn's voice was plain when he eventually spoke. It was another kind of plain than when Liam spoke, a doubt by will rather than a doubt of trying to find the appropriate words. “Liam’s betting more on Harry’s responsibility in this than yours. If you’re looking for any kind of reconciliation from him, that’s what you should go on. Text Harry for me.”

Louis texted, _I hug everyone, sorry if I caused discomfort,_ because he needed to, personally, and then, _I’m winning Zayn over,_ because Harry needed it.

Harry answered, _I’m solving the situation. My parents are going out of town and I can rebuild… Well, I can create a reputation of goodwill for myself._

Louis hoisted up the phone to Zayn’s face long enough for him to get the gist but not long enough to read.

“Since Liam is gone,” Zayn said, and he seemed oddly pleased by the fact, “Did you listen to Chief Moss at the charity dinner?”

It took Louis a second to locate the name. Although he hadn’t, he nodded, unwilling to break the infinitesimal streak of impressive commitment he had gathered for Zayn. Adding, “I might have missed some parts,” in hopes that he would be filled in.

Zayn said, “You aren’t the only one who’s been sceptical of the police in all of this. It can only be concluded that whoever the abductor is, they either have, A: an intricate network of various professions, or B: a hell of a stash to finance the operation. If the Horans have been targeted for a long time, and the others haven’t, it is, as you say, personal this time.”

He had this way about him when he spoke, as if he were a dog pummelling towards daises on the other side of the road and he had been given more leash. It was unlike the detached observer Louis had been introduced to at the dinner, the kind of effusive yet supressed knowledge reflected in Zayn’s sister, as if they were both in on a joke that couldn’t ever be explained to the public. Now all that heat broke loose.

Louis did his best to process as the story progressed. “In the speech, he said, _‘And although we have all our resources spent, there has been no significant progression to the case’,_ which is, obviously, a load of bull, since all they do is made sure all lawns are mowed and the speed limits respected. With this said, I’m positive that the abductor is in plural, and that alternatives A and B are intertwined.”

“Bribed pigs,” was all Louis could say before Liam returned and grimly looked down on the picnic.

Zayn, who had a good five biscuits left, kicked the box towards Liam’s feet. Turning away, Liam let it lie in the grass.

“Aren’t you having any?” Zayn asked, more out of responsibility than goodwill.

Liam didn’t dignify them with an answer.

Louis wondered if there was a particular source to the tension or if it was one of those things without an end or a beginning; it had been this way in the past and therefore it was only sensible that it should be the same way now. There could have been a string of events, parallel rather than consecutive, that had put them here. The moment wasn’t right to confirm his theories.

After skittering around the park, it was decided to cut the search short and continue it at some other point, although the date was left unsaid. During the walk home Liam was brooding as Liam could be and Zayn was critically observing as Zayn could do.

The quietness of the neighbourhood startled Louis, eventually. Not because his company created its own deafening silence, but because he saw no one peeling potatoes in a cooling pot on their porch, or screeching kids filling the now empty swing sets made in either plastic or in abrasive blue rope strung around branches.

It wasn’t only that the town were desolate that played Louis’ nerves, but it was the hum of static around him, as if the skies braced for thunder that never came, as if it could solve all mysteries it so innocently cared for if you could only pacify it.

When they reached Zayn’s street, his mother sat on the leaf-grubbed stairway in tears. The scene offered no space for Liam or Louis. They both remained in the street with Zayn cradling his mother. In the turmoil, there was only Mrs Malik screaming, “Safaa!”, and the silent tremor of her daughters haunting the porch behind her. Ghostly figures like trees losing their foliage partway through summer.

Then Louis noticed the bike a few yards away, bead-decorated spokes a blur in the still spinning wheel, and he could suddenly make sense of the screams.

Liam hadn’t removed his gaze from the Malik sisters when he said, “ _Now_ they’re targeting children.”


	4. Violent hearts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Somehow I hadn't actually tagged this as "Larry", so for all of you joining in now, I'm glad you found this fic and hope you'll enjoy it. Also, kudos to anyone who can tell which songs the chapter quotes are from (feel free to comment if you've got any guesses as to both origin and how it goes with the chapter content, I'd be happy to read it) x

_WE'LL LAUGH UNTIL OUR LIPS GET SOFT_

* * *

Late Wednesday evening, when Louis was still rubbing off the chock from Safaa’s disappearance, dinner was interrupted by a firm knock at the front door. Determinedly goggling her couscous, Lottie didn’t waver at the noise. She eyed the phone next to her plate. It had been still since that afternoon. Waliyha hadn’t texted her for hours and she was sulking because of it.

At first, neither Louis nor Jay moved. His mother gauged him. There had been a heat in her eyes when he came home earlier. Hope, he reckoned, that they would have found clues, restored faith in the community, as if it had been their responsibility from the very beginning. And he had worn the news of another abduction.

The next knock came with sirens striating the kitchen curtains.

Fork falling to his plate with a clatter, Louis shot from his chair and marched to the front door. An officer wielded his badge, featureless to Louis’ eyes, for behind him were flaring cars parked on both pavement and street to make sure none in the vicinity would turn the other cheek. And none did. Curtains were pulled back and peopled camped out on their lawns, some hidden behind barely agape doors to catch a glimpse of the ruckus.

By now, the rest of the Tomlinson ménage had accumulated behind Louis. The officer handed over forms. On his chest glimmered the municipal’s logo below his name tag and badge.

It wasn’t Louis they had come to detain.

In the blasting sirens, a windlass caressed the electric night from the Horans’ garden. Harry looked every part the criminal the rumours made him out to be when officers led him from the doorway where his mother and father silhouetted. There were cuffs and smog of exhaust along the ground and Lottie’s nails drilling Louis’ wrist and an officer holding a green bag of herbs in the porchlight.

Louis headed for the car. Water fell from the roof, or it clung to the grass, gullying his calf below humid sweatpants. Harry’s name caught in his throat. Harry, who refused to breathe the world around him, let alone look at Louis, face soft yet downcast.

All Louis could think about was how they were hacking closer to fulfilling the gossip at school. How he was failing his promise. Whoever hadn’t turned on the strangers in Sunny Hills, would be hostile converted within the forthcoming days. Time was running out for a deadline Louis had yet to grasp.

Tyres blasted up a petrichor-pitched fog. Earth particles danced in the air where dust could not. One of the remaining officers sneezed before packing herself into the last car. Mr and Mrs Styles played textbook parents; a particularly aggressive glean of the porchlight revealed an empty slot for Gemma betwixt them.

Louis couldn't help but consider two things; how fast the rumour-spoiled truth would leak and the collateral damage to come of it.

 

✘

 

In the following week, the town of Sunny Hills, Yorkshire, embedded itself further into the community spirit it was known for. Louis, as a non-citizen as far as citizens with the capital C reckoned, did not participate. In a town with blind trust within the web, someone needed to start severing threads. Luckily for Louis, Zayn seemed keen to work double.

Mornings were spent brooding over the items – _Louis_ -branded items – disappearing from his room, and gnawing out Lottie for a never-pronounced confession while

Afternoons were spent by the football pitch, glossing over homework educating on gerunds and imperatives in favour of watching the school's team practise. Really, it should have been unsurprising how organised the hours were – cones and multiple tiny goals mounted and removed in between exercises, players never straying from cleats-paved grass-lanes – but discipline was ingrained in their veins. Each whistle blow was a serenade; each sprint a privilege. Coach Flowers saluted them.

And so Louis thought he knew the nature of practise. However, it was not Liam's arm who carried the captain's armband, as he had expected him to. Liam, brooding braggart, now modestly resourceful here in the field.

Harry was re-growing his wings fast. Although, Louis could soon see why he must have been hesitating to play for fun; whereas the others dribbled to advance, Harry relied on speed and force to wind ahead. Perhaps he also played the card of the town's primary junkie while spurring for the goal – a matter they had yet to discuss. It wasn't as much Harry evading the topic as it was him evading social interactions of all sorts. Except for practise.

They still reconvened in French and what other classes crossed their paths. Harry still cracked dry puns. Louis still mocked his pronunciation. Their people-watching grew new roots when after practise, Harry found Louis reclining by the monumental red maple at the end of the pitch. More importantly, Gemma was back in school.

Afternoons were spent pursuing new theories for the abductions with Zayn. Sometimes this would happen by the pitch; more often not.

One time, passing up on a coffee at Mary's at Zayn's impervious disdain, Louis escorted them to the outskirts of town that Tuesday, a tiny hide-away in the hillsides by the southern fields. Here lay a house with the same rural charm as the rest of Sunny except it was all of the town, amplified. The ivy rived any stone structure it could find, even the troughs of petunias yielded. More of a backyard rag fair, the scene offered them displays of foreign treasures and mundane knick knacks. Crockery sheep hybrids – horned or five-hooved – played as big a part as the embroidered tapestries of local folklore and three-stined forks.

Incidentally, they served coffee.

Motorcycles were not permitted on the lawn; bikes were. For the house owner and fair-organiser (they were the same person), Zayn briefed that he did not own a motorcycle, and once they had been served coffee by an archaic and in some places patina-infested pedestal table, he briefed Louis that, despite being very much a suburb, and despite being very much isolated without the aid of a myriad horse powers, Sunny Hills was not ordinarily a home of two-wheeled engines. Only a handful of residents owned motorcycles; the workshop employees had only knowledge which encompassed four wheels. Anything below or beyond that was unfixable.

Louis remembered the forlorn vehicle stewed away in the depths of the Horans' garden. Its fiery waxed exterior jaded by years or days – time seemed uneven in the suburbs.

“Niall,” Louis commented.

Zayn closed his eyes.

They drank their coffee.

Evenings were spent by the kitchen table, assisting Lottie with homework by taking her phone hostage and answering Waliyha inanely until she surrendered and handed the phone to Zayn. While little sisters were in the vicinity, however, they kept the topic light. Safaa wasn't to be mentioned.

Evenings were also spent, if Louis was lucky, flicking the blinds in his bedroom or flashing the torch function on his phone on and off. In the neighbouring house's bedroom, Harry did the same. It was a communication neither fathomed, so eventually texting would come into play or the windows would be wide open, all dangling legs and daredevil reaches up to the shingles and pipes.

Days after the intervention at the Styles household, Louis found himself in the heart of Sunny High (a name mocked behind backs but not publicly disgraced by its students) on a desk fit for Lottie Tomlinson's standards. Fewer boyband posters and how-to-bury-a-body miniature charts, but equally stuffed. Not to mention the pinboard above it, cluttered in post-its.

One particular stack of paper retched dust on Louis' hand when he pushed it and unleashed a peculiar stench of cashew and musty cleats.

The desk was occupied by Zayn and stood in the previous janitor's closet currently reserved for the school paper. Zayn had explained that it wasn't so bad, now that they had knocked down a wall.

The clutter swelled the more Louis examined it. He narrowed his eyes.

“It might seem immaculate,” Zayn said, “But it's mostly to keep from forgetting. It's not for show.”

“I wasn't saying.”

Aside from reminders, the pinboard boasted Zayn's achievements. Articles citing _Zayn J Malik_ as the author had been printed by a wide range of magazines and smaller newspapers. Spreads about Eid al-Fitr, POW, workplace harassment. Elsewhere, he had been interviewed with Liam for a paper revelling in Sunny Hills' fourth _Best Kept Town_ award in a row. Whether crumpled paper held the blame or not, the two of them stood close in the photograph, smiling. Another slip of paper told the story of Zayn as an intern with Mr Horan at the Hills editorial office.

Instead of giving in to the burning desire to interrogate Zayn, Louis asked silent permission to fold an airplane out of a smudged paper. Given it, he watched it soar into a wall.

“Party starts in three hours,” he said. Zayn didn't take the bait – _tap tap tap_ – so Louis weaved a hand through the air. “He's doing it to suck up since everyone thinks he's a sibling-psycho.”

“Because of his arrest?”

“Yes. No, he had plans before that. I just think the arrest really manifested the idea.”

Amused while puzzled, Zayn gazed up to Louis where he slouched next to the laptop, longing for the busted paper plane. He said, “And we still don't know what that was about?”

“Nope. It's the same with Gemma.”

“Tonight might be a good chance to find out.” Before Louis could protest, _I'm not going to pry when she's just been in the hospital_ , Zayn gave him a look. “I'll be finished in fifteen and then we can get out.” And so he continued.

Louis figured he better be done in fifteen, since the school closed in twenty.

Growing sick of laptop keys popping and office chair groaning, Louis let his eyes wander across the lack of coffee cups or other edible sources in the clutter. Zayn already had the stereotypical pen behind the ear, so what stopped him from guzzling coffee every thirty minutes? Not even a stain had soaked into the wood.

One article piqued his idle eyes. He screwed the tack from it to examine.

“Story time?” Louis said and let the article slide to Zayn's working fingers.

“You haven't heard about _the boys_? On the news – they were all everyone talked about.”

“For a week or two, before the magic wore off?” He could tell his insolence rankled something in Zayn; it was soon replaced with a steeled look. “Do I look like someone who keeps track of stuff?”

Zayn’s eyes travelled across the screen in the same loop; his fingers smacked against the keys but didn’t push down. It appeared he was striking a deal with himself.

“Couple of years back, this guy drives into Sunny in a stolen car, screaming and with blood on his hands. Literally,” he added before Louis could ask. “Niall's family spot him, so they take him in until police can arrive and find out that he's escaped from this...” Zayn hesitated. “Torture lair. Later, the fire department in Leeds receives news that there's massive smoke coming from somewhere inside the woods, way out of town, confirming what this guy told Niall. Abducted for a year.”

Abducted. It was a word Louis had etched on tongue and eyelids.

“Do you think it's related? Were there matching characteristics?”

At this Zayn shut his laptop, thumbing the article. Countless times of passing it around in class or to authorities had wrinkled it. “They were taken from London. I don't think anyone knows the nature of their abduction. Otherwise I would have brought it up.”

“ _They_ , plural?”

“One didn't make it.”

Louis sighed, consciously flattening his creased forehead. “Motives? What about motives?”

Zayn shook his head.

Locking up, they crossed paths with the janitor who Louis now recognised as Coach Flowers. Unlike in the pitch, here he plodded. As a sign of weariness of comfortable superiority, Louis couldn't decide, but the wrench he coolly wielded suggested the latter. He and Zayn exchanged words and soon they were outside with the double-doored entrance clicked shutting behind and pollen skirting across rills on asphalt. The skies foretold a hot evening.

“I wouldn't say it's particularly wise to host the party of the year if Harry's trying to build his rep,” Zayn said, fastening his Staedtler behind the ear, “But it sure is fun.”

 

✘

 

Instead of joining the party's vanguard, Louis found himself listening to its shrieks from his bedroom. From the vintage point by the window he noted everyone coming and going, every car rolling up, every clandestine firecracker going off on accident in the backyard followed by more shrieks and rising sulphur.

Textbooks, notes and energy drinks banished clothes from the floor – socks turned into lamp screens – but failed to steal his focus, for Harry lounged on the porch. Louis checked once more for his mum's Honda in the driveway, cursed, then opened the window.

Around him the room darkened. He edged out on the windowsill, soaking in the night.

Gnats swarmed the porch light but Harry didn't bother swatting them. Joint poised between full lips, Harry spoke around it, weaving it for emphasis to something he said. Only the beat of laughter made it up to Louis. Harry's boyish grin was still as noticeable.

Moving further along, the boards groused below Louis. The air slicked up his bare ankles, bronzed them in the wheezing porch light, pointed the hollows in his throat. Harry looked up. They waved to each other. The girl he was with stole his joint effortlessly and went back inside.

An engine whizzing up the driveway grabbed their attention. Another wave from Harry. Jay Tomlinson reciprocated. Bags like bangles on her arms, destination set on Louis' room when setting off indoors.

Louis fell backwards onto the bed, mosquitoes firing from his legs, and jammed the window as smoothly as possible. His heart beat with the thrill of it, of finally getting out of the house, of Harry's smile.

“Hi, love,” Jay said; Louis didn't hear her approach. Strands slicked to her forehead. “I checked with Mrs Malik and Waliyha so Lottie is staying the night. Is Zayn going?”

“We're all going.”

Her shoulders slumped out of relief rather than disappointment. He'd had plenty of opportunities to familiarise her disappointed stance, and this was not it.

She said, “At least you'll be close to home. And in good hands?”

He affirmed. Although wiled by the rhythm outside, a heartbeat flatlining only to kick-start, something about his mother stalled him. He wondered why she had been sweating. In her bags, documents and blueprints and fought for air. No clues.

Granted permission to stay by his silence, she sat down on the edge of his desk, saying something half-hearted about the state of his room, one week into school.

“In ways I'm grateful for you kicking me out.” She said this warmly, thus slackening the nerves Louis had strung. No need for defeat, he thought, when her lassitude shone in greying eyes and popping veins. “They've pushed ahead the deadline.”

Far too late, Louis realised he'd been given all the clues but failed fitting them together. He accepted the Werther's given to him. The sweet sting sharpened his mind.

“'They' being the owners or...?”

Jay chugged another caramel, then coaxed out a gum from her purse. The straps of it turned to chains in her possession, squeezing life from her wrists.

“They're unknown. They don't tell us anything in person. Faxes are usually the informant. Once, we met with an associate of the carpenter who didn't give away much, either.”

Louis considered telling her that faxing was probably standard here, and he knew she would laugh, but perhaps she didn't need that tonight. He caught a waft of her perfume, silky honey, vanilla, a mismatch with her demeanour.

“Whatever it is _they_ want,” she said in distaste, each _they_ a blow, “It should happen fast. I reckon there's a lot else on their mind since they've failed to calculate that few workers equals slower progress.”

They listened to the heartbeat next door. Ascending, plummeting, over again in a treacherous waltz.

“So it's secret _and_ urgent,” Louis said.

By now, Jay had realised that the melon gum she chewed on clashed viciously with the caramel. Her face crumpled. The opposite happened to Louis. He didn't know what this information meant, but he knew it must be _something_. Believing in fate did that to you.

With half an ear he registered bags thumping against hips and his mother telling him to be sensible and himself telling her that he was _always sensible, wasn't he?_ Somewhere there were goodbyes. Somewhere the heartbeat flatlined permanently.

Upon arriving at the Styles residence, he saluted the Honda revving away in the fizzing night. Several others mimicked him. Some started saluting each other. The porch as well as the front lawn sported kids from a few years older than Lottie up to people actually eligible to purchase the ciders everyone swilled. Knocked out or high didn't make much of a difference; the mood was decaying, from lounging in the hammock to people who had inhabited the crawl space below the porch with bursting firecrackers.

Louis came to realisation there on the occupied lawn. Not only had he missed the vanguard – he'd missed the peak. No, that wasn't correct either. There would be more peaks. He just needed to find Harry before the next one passed.

Familiar faces blended with drop-outs. On second thought, Sunny High struck him as an unlikely site to harvest drop-outs. Recognising features in passing startled Louis because he could never place them. He wasn't accustomed to partying with peers as much as with strangers. When he was offered a cider which someone had tried peeling away the label at, he took it, more to pass on than to drink himself. Whoever had dealt it to him wheezed in triumph.

Harry stacked empty glasses to a tower in the kitchen with little assistance from his fellow smokers. Most were too busy teaching each other to roll amateur joints on the sink. Others were plopped on the floor feeding each other noodles. Distinct from the rest of the smoky property, the kitchen still smelt of fresh paint and bread crumbs and detergent. Louis' had the same scent.

In between everything he only had time to percept Harry's sweat-freckled smile and the collision of their bodies in the small space given on the matted floor. Then there was Harry's arms and his hammering heart where Louis' shoulder met his neck and his voice, slower than the usual drawl.

“Didn't want to be here all by yourself? Is that why you waited?”

“Had to fix a babysitter for Lotts,” Louis said while withdrawing. “Looks like I missed everything?”

“No, no, no.” Harry took him by the shoulder, urging towards an unknown location, then halted. A gesture to Louis' cider. Only a sliver of liquid still sloshed in the bottle. “I'm so glad you like it – it's from Mary's Corner, that place. Really cheap. It's _wicked_ good.”

Louis handed him the bottle. “Want the last?”

“I don't drink. I wouldn't handle it very well.”

Louis grinned and let Harry's wiry arm brush him along.

Harry said, “This is all on you. Everything is working out. And Doniya helped putting it together, here, tonight. I'm winning them over!” He pointed towards the black staircase where two people shackled together, lipstick and high heels and unforgiving hands.

While simultaneously placing one of them as Doniya, he recognised her as the girl talking to Harry on the porch. It warmed him, that it would work out for Harry. For them both. Two wolves in wool. The Maliks were carved from the same tree, so winning Zayn over couldn't be too difficult.

Louis stopped listening to Harry's continuation when he saw Liam parting from a kiss with her, disengaging only to delve back in. Allowing himself to linger for a second longer, processing the sight, the consequences of what it would mean, they carried on to the porch.

“You've known they're a thing?” Louis asked. “Are they a thing?”

“Gemma told me. It's a couple of months old.”

The night exploded all around Louis. In the flies webbed in the porch light; in the resurrected heartbeat and stomping feet indoors; in Harry's hand slipping to his flank, nesting; in sulphuric air replaced by dauntless honeysuckle meandering the porch. Much like the house and the people under its roof, it had a pulse. It was living, and it made Louis realise how lacklustre he was in comparison.

“We should get away,” he said. “Not... _away_. I want quiet with you.”

“I've been breathing this party for hours. The decision is all yours.”

They edged off the porch, tucked into the impervious shadows looming around the corner. Louis finished off the cider to discard in the crawl space; there were indistinct hoots.

“I've waited for you,” Harry said.

It was too late at night for Louis to interpret the meaning of that, so he trusted the unflinching hand on his flank. This close he could smell the sweetly stale pot woven into Harry's. He wondered if it would taste the same.

“I'm hoping to kiss you tonight. I've been starved.”

Harry said, “I've been thinking about that for a while.”

When it happened, it wasn't bursting firecrackers kindling grass and gutter. It was a breeze in the sweltering night, a hint of water to arid lips. It was the reminder of being awake that followed Louis into his dreams.

Strokes of seniors sidled on the shadow's edge en route indoors, none too eager to identify them. Louis mapped out the slight of grease in Harry's hair, bruises from practise joint with scratches from recklessly moving through crowds, the hand grounding him now on his hipbone, the quiver of lips and crinkling nose after a kiss. While he savoured Harry this way, Harry did the same.

A firecracker went off in the crawl space. Since the music boiled all around, Louis slanted his head to Harry's shoulder, ear to throat for hearing. He was still hungry.

Harry's voice vibrated against him. “Let's get out – I have a place. Let me check on Gemma and we can go soon.”

Stepping from the shadows, Harry took the porch's steps in threes. A clique stinking of tar followed him inside with disoriented hoots. Flaring cigarette butts soiled the railing, an ashtray just out of reach.

Louis peered to his bedroom window where the curtains were still and the lights out. Missing the prelude of the party didn't matter now that Lottie was safe and sound on the other side of town. His mouth stole him away from his thoughts, sticky hot, and he was even more grateful his little sister didn't have a chance of insight to his night.

In the backyard, a cluster of girls raved in the wild flowerbed near the fence, drooping bouquets of yarrow and lupines in their hands and hair. Both sorts were too messy and abundant for Gemma to wear but these girls took turns braiding them into each other's hair, wild creations that curled over ears and into hairbands.

It was a drop-in, with guys and gals joining and parting by the minute. Zayn caught Louis' gaze where he crouched to give his hairdressers leverage – football team or fellow aspiring journalists, Louis couldn't recall, and he wasn't sure it mattered tonight. Zayn's scalp glimmered with violet buds.

“What have you been doing all night?” he asked when reaching Louis on the other side of the lawn.

“Investigating,” Louis said. The Staedtler had left Zayn. So had everything Louis thought characterised him. Therefore, he dared prodding. “You didn't tell me about Liam and your sister. But I don't understand. Shouldn't that just make him give a damn about you instead of acting like a prick?”

Zayn's eyes strayed. “Do you have any water?”

Louis led him to the patio where someone had graciously placed multiple glasses and protein bars. Zayn prepared to chug a glass where a dead fly graced the surface. Louis exchanged the drinks before he had the opportunity.

Sated, Zayn took a moment to gauge the garden scene.

“I just think,” he started. “Don't you think we deserve one night? It doesn't pass a second where I'm not thinking about whether Waliyha is safe, if there's something I can do. So now I'll just... Not do that for a bit. Can I stay at your place tonight?”

The rapid transition had Louis blinking, watching his bedroom's empty window again, all scenarios of Harry and him ending up there turning to dust.

“Let yourself in,” Louis said. Harry called his name from the street. It was too late to hide the flash of elation across his face. “I don't need to explain myself, do I?”

Zayn snorted and took another swing of water. Louis was already moving.

“Just sit on the stairs till I come back if it isn't unlocked already.”

Harry's place turned out to be two houses over: The Horan residence.

Elsewhere his presence would deflate and frame him a gauche prop. Here he was the catalyst. The garden gave itself to him in pines bowed, avaricious thickets revered his gnarled back in the whisper of moonlight. When he dove into the swing set, limbs rooting by the feeble structure, it harrowed.

It was the glitch Louis needed to jerk ahead.

The shivering swing was a mirage and Harry its centre, boastfully smearing his greased fingers across the pristine. In Niall's wake, it had become embossed with dying insects and their brain substance.

Now Louis placed the nipping at his skin: the night wasn't swelling in zest, it was decaying.

Harry's fingers wired around his wrist. He offered up the joint to decline. The haze of his blond hair ghosted the chains, knees knobbed, recently mudded shoes kissed by dew. A smile fit for flyers. _Missing._

It wasn't Niall's thumb torqueing his artery. The motions escaped Louis, but he saw himself rocking back and forth on the swing's dented plastic, Harry mimicking, Harry stroking his pulse, while lagging in the memory of Niall's last night.

Sans the garish tape and surveillance, the plot was a crime scene. They were nonbelievers in a chapel, dawdling in the pews, breathing archaic tales to squander.

He soaked the nightmare, then frowned. Had these seats been battered before?

He said, “We're violating him.”

“Niall's not dead.”

“His image isn't. By all chances he's in a ditch in Wales and you're smoking on his memorial.”

For a few seconds, there was a beat to ask about his arrest, how he had been released if they had caught him red-handed and everyone in town wanted him punished. Who would have the guts to deal in Sunny Hills? Then Harry's thumb was accompanied by residual fingers and the joint tossed to the gutter. Time kept on.

“Well, I'm not going to trim his hedges.” It sounded like an unforgivable curse. “Either way, they won't be home for a while, will they?”

Louis burst from the swing. Something teetered his vision as he did. Their reflections crooked in the living room windows; reminders of the now ghosts that could have been watching. Family portraits loomed behind, objects sleazy reporters from across the county had sought during the initial search for the Horans. The buzz had died down. Only these streets still broadcasted the pleasantly smiling family.

More than ever they were trespassing. Louis told Harry this, paired with swears.

Harry raised his free hand, pupils flaring out. “That was insensitive.” Louis could tell there was an _although_ behind it. He didn't sit back down. “He's a narcissist. Always has been.”

Jaw crushed, Louis said, “I never saw those tendencies.”

“Right. Though you didn't know him, in all fairness.”

“Don't be a twat.”

Harry quieted. A windlass serenaded them. It couldn't ease the pit of tar broiling in Louis' gut. It wolfed guts and marrow and ate at his head. The touch on his wrist anchored him.

Harry couldn't know Niall. Even so, why slander him? He was the golden boy for a reason; Louis had soaked in the reasons. Moreover, it was hard not to drown in them when he had a view of the roof they had sat on and the shrubs into which Niall had vanished, that first time.

Unable to word it, Louis just knew the feeling differed from the plain surge of blood to his head when Harry touched him. Its layers went deeper.

“How do you know him?” Louis asked. “Since when?”

“Far too long. Can I just say I'm sorry? He's probably... It's been a while, he's bettered, surely.”

Louis knew he should prod. Zayn had known. But unlike Zayn, Louis didn't possess the stamina to pursue and expose hoaxes for pleasure, or the brilliance to piece it all together. It wasn't a burden he was willing to carry. Not tonight. That's what the day had been made for.

So they sat. They rocked back and forth. They talked about fresh anecdotes from the party – Louis' were terse more of lassitude than loath; Harry's were tales Louis had lived different nights in different towns. They ate Twirls Harry carried in his pocket. They kissed. Harry made him warm.

They moved out of sight, lying in the grass. The conversation sparked to saucy details about Liam's habit pre-match – one being he would pick his cleats of crunched vegetation every chance he got, another being his voice rocketing in pitch to pubescent upon calling teammates or referees. Louis shared trivia about his mates back in the city.

In the end, the cold battered him into Harry's side. Snared together by it, Louis felt he finally belonged. Harry had invited him to the kingdom, this world of haunting foliage blushing overhead, of rakes becoming claws entombed in the shed. An old wheelbarrow recently mulched, attracting a flourishing bug life with basic herbs for the shy gardener. Beyond leaned Niall's motorcycle, a miracle of metal and benzene.

The two-wheeled boyhood dream hadn't shifted out of place, hadn't been scrubbed, yet it haunted. Its presence roused Louis.

Harry grappled for him to lie back down, raking the imprint his body had left in the grass, ghosted over Louis' hitched shirt. Clover embedded in Louis' bare back. His nerves were strung once more, as if he had heard a nightmarish caw.

“Greg's,” Harry declared as he unstitched clover from skin, pressing his thumb to the irate marks below.

Louis swallowed, and even when he had, his voice was small and hesitant. “What?”

“It's Greg's.”

Louis crunched the wrap of his Twirl and headed for the vehicle.

Astringent gasoline assaulted his face, insinuating a leak down by the peppery blossoms. Blindly he ruffled through the greenery. Aside from sparse dew it was a dry brush to his palm.

“Louis,” Harry said, as much a warning as a plea.

Skimming over the leathered handles and seat fruitlessly, Louis ducked. There had to be confirmation somewhere. He needed there to be. Without maintenance, the tail light had exploded in a flurry of red and black. The fenders had become coated by the same mix of avian faeces and imploded bugs as the swing set.

And so there, on the flank of the fuel tank, sturdy and gracelessly carved, a makeshift signature.

_Prop. of GREG HORAN_

 


	5. Glitch

_THE OUTSIDE LOOKS NO GOOD AND THERE AIN'T NOTHING UNDERNEATH_

* * *

  

“… _Oh._ What is that stench?”

It wasn't unusual for Louis Tomlinson's bedroom to become stuffed in the mornings. It was akin to hoarding dead leaves just crumbling under a new-born sun – the same scorch on textile and flesh, as if bursting from inside – and in it, guests of the bedroom claimed to taste various memories. One spoke of hikes in arid mountains (the backyard hills with a dear friend: asthma). Another said it conjured sentiments of a chaotic weekend at the family cabin, all ashes and acrid boxwood and silty shores.

Louis thought it to be a fusion of dusty skin and, in fact, decaying plants. Somewhere in there were excessive hair products, to which Zayn currently contributed seventy per cent. Their new residence added a scintilla of concrete freshness to it. The stuffy edge remained.

“Home,” he said.

It had stuffed up on the regular back in the city. Fumes slithered through failing pipes, neighbours overcooked dinner and mulched the flowerbeds with it. Once he had found Lottie eating a burnt chicken leg in his window.

Currently, it was the only comfort Louis had, as Zayn raved with dulled flare on his tongue.

“They _aren't_ corrupt,” Zayn said. “And you've said it yourself, _Best Kept Town._ That's a heavy title. It's a title majorly founded on the public sector. But they've been insufficient in searches that should've given more evidence.”

“I'm not— I don't follow here, really. I hear you but I'm not connecting.”

Zayn had taken the moment to underline something in his journal and cross out another something. Lines looped in poetry at his touch.

Louis also had notes. Physically, they were tattered by additional details Zayn offered during conversations like this. Mentally, they read _FAILURE_.

“Before the abductions, there wasn't much for them to do in these parts. Guard a fair. Attend a charity dinner. Of course, they don't have much to do now, either, since they're located in the city. Which is _exactly_ why it could work.”

Mimicking the sound of leaking water, the thump in Louis' head eased into a mournful ditty. Yesterday it had been less pronounced but all the more malevolent. He concluded it was more pending whiplash from the recent revelations than it was alcohol.

Especially now.

Without condescendence, Zayn explained. “If they were bound here, there's no chance they would let themselves be bribed. There can't be.”

“But they're not,” Louis offered.

Zayn lit up. “Therefore it's plausible someone's plainly bribing them or using blackmail. Bribing would require financially wealthy perpetrators, naturally. Blackmailing would mean they are wealthy in information.”

Louis mauled the notebook to the damp sheets Zayn had kicked off at four in the morning. The action was dissatisfactory, so he sharpened his gaze for emphasis.

“Liam Payne,” he said.

“Are you hungover?”

“ _You._ You are. You're in denial.”

“I want to hear the motive.”

It halted Louis in his march. Maybe he was hungover.

“The wealth, for starters. Popularity. Sole successor of the throne. You're doubting him too,” he said. “Otherwise you two would be playing detective and not loiter with me. What's Liam doing to find him? What’s Liam done for him?”

Zayn grimaced at another streak of _home_ in the room. Louis got up and pushed open the windows – the parched September air tickled his throat. He turned his back to it and sat in the window nook. An idle hand brushed the sloped ceiling overhead.

The problem lay in the fact that Louis couldn't pick out the right details for Zayn to glue together. No information was confidential, but which of it was necessary to disclose?

_Harry._

Last night seared its way to his front lobe. Two fingers pressed to his temple.

“Harry knows Niall,” he said.

Zayn bundled up the sheets in silence far away on the mattress.

Louis explained. Then he said, “He was just venting, right? There can't actually be any truth to it.”

“Except that there is,” Zayn said.

He tossed Louis the beaten notebook and a pen. Louis left it alone.

In the loaded quiet, he interpreted Zayn's thoughts for the first time. As he did, he realised they were an echo.

_Guess you aren't really mates._

“You're in denial,” Zayn said. It was flat.

A fly circled Louis' ear. A moment later it clashed with his eye. He swatted it, holding both eyes shut, processing.

“It certainly gives him a motive if Niall was a selfish prick—“

“Narcissistic.”

“Just consider it. You said it, their kidnapping was personal. It had to be. So accusing Liam doesn't mean he's got Safaa locked up, just that he got tired of being a sidekick.”

For a second, Zayn's teeth bared, a conscious slip of lip and vengeance. In them, Louis surged to the leaf-dappled stairs, Mrs Malik's jarring laments, Liam's infallible stance.

Neck craned to the door, the ferocity dripped off while listening to Lottie barraging the stairs. Fresher scents of breakfast lurked on the other side.

When he turned back, he was impassive, picking apart the facts. He yielded nothing in his thoughts.

Finally, he said, “Liam's too lazy to have done it himself. Too prideful to let someone else.”

Head hanging, Louis picked at the spirals of the notebook. It contained more notes in the margins – Zayn reserved the lines for him.

He said, “You could have told me about him and Doniya. I would've had more time to think about important stuff if I hadn't been trying to figure out why you two were so tense all the time.”

“And you figured them dating was reason enough?”

Louis blinked, searching for ways to disarm the situation. He edged out on a limb, saying, “If she's pregnant, yes.”

It wasn't a smile that crossed Zayn's mouth, but it was light enough. “Mum would disown her.”

Not answering near enough of his questions, Louis confined the toxic of _Greg_ Horan to his head. The truth hadn't matured for him, because there was still this: Louis Tomlinson, insolent outsider – Zayn Malik, locally suave. He had broken enough boundaries for a lifetime since arriving. It had been a matter of weeks. If he was to prod further, it would have to be in silence.

Just like that, he knew how to spend his evening.

 

✘

 

During breakfast, Jay had fallen heads over heels for Zayn, whereas Lottie showed mild interest in anything but the diced bacon on her plate. They had discussed his current work on family relations and how it was a wise and interesting subject to delve into in the light of recent events. Batting the conversation back and forth, at times wittily and at times solemnly, Zayn basked in the praise while Jay declared him the forth member of the family. Louis flicked eggs at his sister's phone screen.

So when Louis said he would spend that night at the Maliks, once Zayn had left, she clipped fresh petunias from the backyard and dusted off an inherited vase she never had much care for other than the sentimentality, popping a note on it and sent it off with him. He didn't read what the note said. He gave Lottie five quid to deliver it to Waliyha for and thus arranged both transport and secrecy well under his budget.

Late afternoon, he knocked on the Styles' door. Gemma greeted him in harems pants and a fading hair dye. Bloodless slashes striated her forearms with the same scope as swarms of insect bites, but had none of its pus. Some of them reddened while he watched.

Louis glanced to her nails; jagged, as if having broken off a cutting session.

Her slurp startled him. She lowered a cup he hadn't noticed. Its side boasted the title _World's okayest sister_.

“I would offer cleaning assistance but I both suck at it and am not interested,” he said. “Love your hair, it's chic.”

A sudden press to his chest. When he looked down, he held the cup in his arms. Despite the odd calm to Gemma's voice, it contained authority.

“Load the dishwasher, please. I'll check if H is available.”

Then she left. The door left agape, the white oak intestines and its muscles of second-hand purchased heirlooms and electronics woven with corrosive detergent and force-fed plants. Few family photos cluttered the walls, unlike what he had seen of the Horan household. Instead, snapshots of blurred objectives, such as ambiguous figures in a meadow, or spare parts for a car of hefty build, occupied the space. Dust latched to Louis' finger when he brushed the crown.

As it happened, the kitchen unfolded straight ahead.

One of the bathrooms had been sealed shut. A note informed him that this was due to heavily unpleasant odours. Louis wasn't in the mood to rebel.

Just finishing with the dishes, a shudder coiled his back. Straightening up, hand enclosing one of the swilled glasses in the sink's liquor tower, he worked to steady his flaring pulse. When he spun around he readied the glass to launch.

Harry's slow grin only pummelled his nerves.

“It's one thing for me to do your fucking dishes,” Louis said – something crunched, shrill and hot, “But it's rude to stalk your guests.”

“Jumpy?”

Louis thought nothing of it until Harry refused to let his gaze up, grin dusted. Shards from the broken glass splintered Louis' palm and danced in sunlight and blood by his feet. By the time he saw this, Harry had already pressed a damp towel to the fleshy pad of his hand. The shards careened below the sink.

“Today you need to be my partner in crime.”

Harry ordered him to keep the pressure tight and resumed control when he returned with some tweezers.

“Come to the bathroom. There's proper lighting there.”

Louis gawked.

Harry clarified, “The upstairs one.”

Some leftover vodka and cotton pads later, Louis had self-inflicted bite marks on his shoulder and a bandaged palm. Gemma had fastened it properly when it unwrapped on its own accord. No neighbours had inquired about the noises thus far.

“We need to break into Liam's house,” Louis said with Harry's curls twined around his unsoiled hand. Everything about the afternoon howled summer. In the hammock, they both wore Harry's hoodies.

“I have practise,” Harry said. It left room for interest to any activity but practise.

“Precisely.”

“It's the first post-practise meeting about our part in the Halloween Run. Major responsibilities. For example, I am playing the part of a tree.”

It shocked Louis that Harry needed persuasion, and then it surprised him to find it shocking. Let alone needing persuasion when they _were using the same argument_.

“Either I go in by myself, or you follow, but I'm breaking in whichever way.” To Harry's quiet challenge, he said, “I'm a city brat. I can pick locks.”

“Master of persuasion,” Harry said. The sweep of his toes across the wood as they rocked back and forth. White paint chips freckled his hardened heels. Eyes yet to be opened, he nudged into Louis' palm. Whatever was lurking on his tongue, it came with his slow breaths meandering below Louis' hoodie.

“Gemma has to come with us.”

Just like his sister's, the voice left no room for debate.

Louis said, “Great. By any chance, does she have a penchant for picking locks?”

 

✘

 

In that moment, Louis understood the meaning of blessings.

Doniya had come to the pending crime scene at Gemma's request, ready to scoop her up in arms and cherry perfume and aid her scratches. Afterwards, she produced a key from her bra and unlocked the front door. For some reason, Louis doubted she would have refused the favour even if Gemma hadn't been there.

He wondered if Zayn would do him the same favour.

Breaking in with a key, Louis noted, was as efficient as living in the house.

On the upside, it was no longer illicit, but rather. On the downside, the floors were every bit as immaculate as Louis had predicted, and it had just started to rain.

Each had toed off their shoes and hoodies had been flung over armoires in the hallway. Even so, Louis checked for muddy prints where they had walked.

Only when they were _in_ did Louis realise he didn't have concrete instructions for what and where to search. In his head, it had been him and Zayn, even though he had strictly ruled out Zayn from the plan as it formed. There hadn't been a need to plan instructions since Zayn knew the case better than he did. He wondered when they had become investigators. Another thing: somehow, he hadn't expected the Payne residence to be so minimalistic. It was styled Horan-extreme, Tomlinson polar-opposite.

So when Harry pet one of the living room's vacuumed plaids and asked, “What's the objective?”, Louis could physically feel himself plummet.

“ _If_ ,” Louis began, “Liam is involved, he isn't in it alone. Anything here is fair game. Everything is plain – it shouldn't be too difficult to recognise an oddity, yeah?”

Although the last bit aimed to still his own peace of mind, _they had this, this would give, it hadn't been a waste, he would have something to showcase Zayn_ , the Styles siblings divided with practised efficiency. The living room stretched around Louis, a hollow vessel.

Much like all other larger properties, a tool-shed marred the lawn. Guiding the slide doors aside and borrowing a pair of slippers, he stepped towards it as far as he got on the terrace. Lichen crawled the shingles and sputtering pipe. In no other place would Louis have found it charming.

Mindlessly, he set off towards it.

Mud squashed and sparrows coasted from below the corrugated roof to haven in a majestic oak. The Paynes must have made peace with their neighbours, for no one questioned the boy rubbing grime off the shed windows, back curved to fit a classical burglar's profile.

When he tried the handle, it didn't give. He fumbled above the wall lantern for spare keys or a clue to where it could be. He ransacked the sparse flower pots. He tried the window again.

The Paynes at least didn't hide a dead sibling's motorcycle in there.

Anxious, Louis had to retreat, clammy as he wiped down himself with palms and shirt. Before he could deposit the slippers, Gemma sailed past with a cloth and started rubbing, still moving through the bottom floor.

“Won't there be more to clean up?” Louis asked.

She said, “Everything is culminating in the kitchen. It's as if _they_ took the brunt of H's party. Doniya must have spent the night.”

Harry called from upstairs. It was more a caw than a worded request. Louis set off.

At first, the only significant thing was Harry attempting to point at five different locations at the once and succeeding. Louis didn't understand the urgency.

“Look,” Harry said. He gestured between the doors.

In the far end of the hall, a bachelor pad appeared in all its laundry scattered mix of childhood mementos and vulgar posters and toys. Covers pooling around the bed exposed knickers, lipstick smears and a box. A hanger above the bed carried a _PAYNE 14_ jersey.

Louis followed Harry's hand to the rooms before them. Both swept clean, beds made with decorative pillows in mellow fawn shades and embroidered quotes, plants on the windowsill never withering in their plastic.

“Could Liam just be the black sheep of the family?”

Harry shook his head. “The parents are a right mess as well.”

“It's not really a surprise, is it? His sisters are away.”

“For how long?”

Louis closed his mouth.

Back on the bottom floor, he found himself loafing up and down the hallway. Gemma had put the cleaned slippers back in place. Where she sat on the ottoman, smoothing over scratches in the roar of downpour assaulting the outdoor awning, she resembled both versions Louis had seen of her so far, both with an unshakable serenity, even as the sound of every revving or slumbering car engine outside had Louis breathing shallowly.

He found the kitchen just as she had described, all half-eaten yoghurt bowls and banana peels in curtains over the swan-necked tap and mosaic of crumbs. The sweet scent of it told Louis it wasn't from bread. The disarray no longer stirred hope in him. It wasn't against the law to soil your home.

After scanning the cabinets and finding a secret stash of Chupa Chups, he allowed himself a lung-rattling sigh.

There were motives. Statistically stereotypical, but wasn't that a description of the entire town? Maybe Liam _was_ too lazy to concoct and execute a plan himself. Hadn't the Payne sisters vanished the same day Safaa was taken?

Harry startled Louis from his theories by coming downstairs. An arm looped around his waist, palm hollowed around his hipbone. Louis sighed again.

“I've checked all of upstairs,” Harry said. “The key cabinet by the door has been emptied of everything but a car key, so I think the shed is a lost cause.”

Harry must have seen him from one of the bedrooms. Louis counted the rooms he had searched, trying to calculate where Gemma could have been. Asking her appeared futile; she kept repeating the soothing motions over her wounds, eyes dull.

Harry said, “Do you want to search the closet under the stairs again?”

“There's a closet there?”

Harry brushed him down the hallway, knocking away a door that had been shielding their view. A smaller opening showed behind.

They went inside.

Another messy hideaway, the closet represented all other disorders swept from other rooms in the house. It all accumulated in lanky homemade shelves. Cables hung overhead from the teeth of the stairs, eloping from rounded holes the size of flies, or wasps; a nest in the making. Decorations the same theme as the two cleaned bedrooms – fawn photograph borders containing stock photos – paired with them. The walls narrowed around their bodies.

“So you've already gone through this?”

“While you were out.”

Louis touched the walls, checking if they were in fact bulging inwards. They weren't.

He edged inside, creating space to explore while Harry stayed in the doorway. Light didn't reach the corners, so he felt his way ahead.

He hit something like varnished cardboard. He swept his palm across it over and over. The bumps of the walls were of entirely different material than whatever he touched. The smoothness didn't match cardboard.

Without a word, Harry offered light from his phone. He burst into Louis by accident, and the wood groaned as Louis weighed against it for stability. Louis swallowed a gasp.

“This isn't fixed,” he said, tasting the truth of it. Once he was certain, he repeated the statement. “Help me lift this.”

The two of them removed the fake wall in twists and tugs and sidles and scraped-up hands. It cooperated, as if used to follow the motions.

When it gave, they torched the darkness.

Ants sprinted over the walls behind. They scurried over clear prints of the stairwell around them, into the tiny holes, around a toolbox on the concrete. Louis coughed and ducked into his elbow with watering eyes. Beneath the onslaught of oil swelling around them, traces of nature surfaced. Dried bilberry plants and mushrooms, similar to the scent of parched moss. Reluctantly nearing, Louis saw that there was a fistful of moss scattered in the box. In it lay spades, blue industry rope, miniature rakes, mismatching jigsaw pieces, pill bottles, scraps of torn dishrags sewn to a garment.

Louis gawked. With a small voice, he said, “This doesn't make sense.”

“Gemma!”

Louis' attention averted to Harry's call but his gaze remained. His thoughts jumbled.

Footfalls treaded up behind them. Harry seized one of the identical pill bottles and read the label.

“Liam's or Mr Payne's,” Gemma said without looking from her feet and crossed arms. “Both have trouble sleeping. It must be theirs.”

“Sleeping pills,” Harry said. He meant _It should have been obvious_.

“Sleeping pills,” Louis echoed. He meant _This is it_.

He took a deep breath to still the frightening elation soaking him. The smell of wood came over him once more. Against his better judgement he reached into the box, knuckles to the iron tools, to the scraps of moss, earth dusted on his skin. _Could this be it?_ And so, _Are they in the woods?_

He didn't realise there was anything wrong until his shirt collar cut off his air and he was dragged from the toolbox in favour of the hallway, across massive chords. He retched at the sudden pressure. It eased. He fell to the wall, hands patting it down. Harry left him gurgling and hunched over something obscured from Louis' view.

Clutching his throat, smoothing the crumpled fabric of his collar, he rubbed off the feel of Harry's chokehold. Peering back inside the closet, he had kicked one of the lanky shelves on their way out. It had shed a shallow box of bolts which somehow remained intact. He didn't care.

He realised Harry was gushing to the something he had darted for, bucking against invisible pressure.

Louis cursed his name and used the wall for leverage to near him. Bit-back gasps sounded from below him, around the corner. To Louis' relief, swallowing went easy, so he released his throat.

Gemma bucked in Harry's arms when Louis rounded the corner of the kitchen. The gushing remained nonsensical, but the rawness of it severed Louis. It was that of a hunter having sniped his first prey and regretting it.

Harry acknowledged him with a flick of his head, back to the hallway. “Leave the box and then we'll leave. We have to leave.”

 

✘

 

Harry didn't explain what had happened. Once Gemma's breathing regulated and her knees offered stability, the siblings had made the quiet walk home.

Louis had purposefully lagged behind, for once pushing sense before his own needs. He had spun the neighbourhood as a drained sun banished the drizzle, eyeing the strip of wood ploughing field and ditches beyond their lane.

The memory had resurfaced of Liam and Zayn alike being reluctant to go beyond borders in their pursuit for Niall, where the woods was a defiant line. As did the memories of Liam, quiet in the football pitch, waiting for instructions. Of Zayn telling him about _the boys_ , about a forest fire. Of Liam and him at ease with their surroundings, with each other, months ago.

Back in his bedroom, for many afternoons thereafter, he lay out notes, leafed through photographs in his phone, straightened the corners of his scrunched Sunny Hills map, raking himself for ideas on how he would fill in the blank spaces. His carpet became a pinboard with inane clues he told himself somehow paired up.

Now and then he looked out the windows, yearning to take the edge off. No blinds or torches waved back at him. Pollen and leaves garnished the cars in Niall's driveway.

One day in school, Zayn informed him of a Malik-calculated plan he had been working on between assignments and school articles. It involved a trip to proper civilisation, lurking in cafés and parks, and shading police. Chief Moss was the main target. Zayn was armed with the Staedtler and a taste for bribery.

Zayn didn't invite Louis. Louis didn't ask to come.

That night Zayn checked in with him again, relaying the events of the evening. It added two pages worth of details to Louis' beat-up notebook and the notion of police bribery jingled plausible as ever. In a beat of silence over the phone, Louis debated briefing him about the discoveries made in the Payne residence, soon deciding against it. The call ended.

Louis wondered if the root to his and Liam's feud could be as simple as them being the bodyguards and Niall the head; behead the creature and its limbs would flail in meagre attempt to prolong life. The rest of the body would rot. Just because it wouldn't survive didn't mean it didn't fill its function.

He texted Harry a proposal to play footie in the backyard. It went unanswered.

Short of a week after the break-in, Louis followed Lottie to her first self-defence class at the library. As many parents as children or teens attended, plastered to walls and benches loaned from the sports centre as if it was a competition they needed to cheer for. Then Lottie joined the Malik sisters crowding the instructor – Holly Round turned out to be years older and an infatuation of Liam's, something Doniya and she found amusing – and Louis tasted the fresh fear in the room. Of course it was a competition.

Many of the bystanders copied the moves Holly taught. Ex-neighbours practised torqueing wrists from iron grasps and jerking thumbs. Adults whose children attended the class allowed their parents to go through the motions of smacking their noses, palm first.

Despite having promised to take his sister, neither Harry nor Gemma showed.

Mid-class, they stopped attacking and defending and began screaming. Piercing howls from, grunt from lads a few months younger than Louis. He had been blissfully unaware of the actual moves performed, so the boisterous transition slaughtered his ear drums.

Lottie was laughing. She and Waliyha stood head to head, vibrating and eyes clenching. All other couples mimicked.

After class, on their way home in gusts of wind and a diminishing horizon, Lottie explained that they had been instructed to practise their vocal chords. At first, many had trouble committing – not Lottie, though, Louis knew from experience – but eventually the embarrassment disappeared and it was only about preventing a full-blown attack.

Louis couldn't care less. The explanation dragged on the entire walk, swerving into other topics. Did he know Waliyha and she had invented their own language? He'd rather suffer a kidney infection. Still he posed follow up questions, grasping her wrist or shoulder when passing a broken streetlight, soothed by the thought that there was an abducted child somewhere fitting her profile, but it wasn't her.

It took watching three whole practises with the football team for Louis to realise Harry refused them as well. By then, he had given up texting, had stopped glancing towards Harry's bedroom before going to sleep, had abandoned hope of Doniya answering when he asked about Gemma. Coach Flowers had almost become an acquaintance of his.

Despite this opening up more time to hover over Zayn while he prepared an interview for the Halloween Run, Louis couldn't find it in him to disclose the break-in. Moreover, none of the Maliks were full of shit, so it could be Louis was. Twisting it, all _evidence_ he had gathered could be coincidental. Who was to say an outsider wouldn't find the same _evidence_ in his own house?

 

✘

 

At the end of the week, Louis didn't get out of bed. The Saturday catered to him in forms of rain, his mother working overtime, a jug of water from last night by his bed, Twirls Harry had smuggled with him home, the window being close enough to crawl and jerk open. Limbs ached. Head disobeyed him. The smell of home rose and crept away during the day.

Come evening, Jay brought up Ibuprofen he gobbled and she perched first on his desk to assess the surroundings, then moved to her son's bed when given the silent _okay_.

“You know I support your life choices,” she said, and before she could continue Louis was already swarmed with snippets of him coming out, first times drunk, not using a condom that one time, but then she said, “But I need you to at least eat one meal a day. And brush your teeth and rinse.”

Louis smiled. She had a thing for teeth.

“I'm wearing socks,” he said.

“You're wearing _a_ sock. And it's Lottie's.”

“Not my fault when she keeps stealing my stuff!”

Lottie boomed from across the hall, “What would I need your stuff for? It's _gross_.”

Louis tossed his head to the pillow in defeat, flailing arms threatening the water jug.

“Oh,” Jay said. It was a tiny sound, much like the tone both her children had somehow inherited – _somehow_ being because both Tomlinson siblings were loud and fierce creatures. “I forgot the prints at work. I have to go back.”

“They can't last without you?” Louis' voice dug itself from a pit of stinky boy and down.

She hadn't heard him, already out the door. Louis heaved himself into a pair of sweats and the hoodie Harry had left behind, bolting down the hall. Lottie tossed the other sock after him.

In a pant ferocious enough for his mother to stop and ponder his health, Louis grappled the corner of the wall and asked, “Can I come with?”

While she gauged him, he felt the brunt of the day's stasis. He clutched the corner harder, intestines grousing and vision dreamily surreal.

With deliberation, she said, “It'll just be back and forth. Forty minutes.”

Quickly he nodded.

They jetted out of town with the windows down. For a cautious and sensible woman, Jay drove as if only her mind raced and her body was tucked away somewhere else. It was a work of steady feet on the pedals, alternating with machine-like precision, eyes ahead while scanning ditches and rear-view mirrors for cyclists, deer and abandoned vehicles.

In spite of his nausea, Louis prodded a hand into the night. It was all there was: a beaten Honda driven to insanity, its two passengers, the blunt glass bracing his arm, and the black eternity _beyond_. It was as wickedly toxic as a Kavinsky song, and he craved to fill the sneers of squalls with the languid electric beat.

Once the euphoria wore off he rummaged through the glove compartment for gums or caramels to soothe the overwhelming thrum of nothingness in his head and throat.

“I want to know what it's like,” Louis said, an explanation his mother hadn't asked for but now appeared be have solemn interest in. “To work at that place. Sounds hellish.”

“It is,” Jay admitted without delay. She closed the windows. “Money is a motivation obviously, because they don't loosen the reins on us a whole lot. The rest of the team are nice. Equally puzzled as I am as to what the secrecy is about, so that's a plus.”

“Are they nice or are they _nice_?”

Jay had shown them photos of the core crew – seven men and her. Seven men which, in both siblings' opinion, had been cut for Dressmann commercials, and whereof the majority were Sunny residents themselves. So Jay huffed.

“As if Lottie wouldn't have told you already if they were _nice_ ,” she said.

“She would,” Louis agreed, and they drove the final slice of the route in silence.

In all features except the architectural, Midsummer Manor was a farm. The scattered barns had come together in a single mansion, the pastures wiped of cattle where wooded hills swelled from the ashes. On the northern flank, an excavator perched implied a former gully man-made into a river roving the landscape, and on the south, the woods waned in favour of chalky fields no one had harvested.

Jay ignored the skeletal monument and veered for one of the makeshift booths mounted for purpose of offices. The booths were located in the rutted front yard amidst an unmistakable stench of dusted earth and parched moss, a tint of sweetness and gasoline—

Louis froze outside the corrugated blue booth. Of course it would smell that way, he reasoned. It didn't mean anything. But once his mind had started spinning there was no appeasing it; the secrecy around the project, anonymous owners, offshore from civilisation, its blatant ties to Sunny Hills – the web unravelled.

Goggling the sloping earth down to a basement where a sign glared _NO TRESPASSING – STAFF PROHIBITED_ , he conceded with his gut.

When Jay locked up, Louis had trouble glancing away.

“Why Sunny Hills?” he asked.

“Come again?”

“I can understand that we needed to move closer here so you wouldn't have to drive up. So why Sunny?”

They didn't walk to the car. Jay swept strands of damp hair from her face. Louis didn't understand how she could sweat in this weather.

She said, “Because they asked me to. They paid part of the property costs, made a very appealing statement.”

“Like, bribed?” Receiving no reply other than pursed lips and creased skin, Louis' eyes fell open fully. “They seriously bribed you?”

“To keep silent, perhaps.” Jay considered, frozen halfway into her jacket. She snapped out of it and cocooned herself. “I've never seen it as bribery. The salary is good, but...” She began for the car. “What makes you say that?”

They hopped into the Honda. Louis' jeans slid across the cool leather, his feet pressing him back. He worried a hangnail, stalling, and he studied the three-floored mansion and its forbidden basement, the blue industry rope meandering loose boards.

“Zayn and I,” he said, hoping it would suffice as hook. For a while, he didn't say anything else. Neither did she. Headlights seared across the road.

“Zayn and I think the ones who abducted the Horans live in Sunny. And now I think you've been bribed to keep this place in the dark, somehow.”

It had to be connected. Too many coincidences had fallen into place. He had to tell Zayn about the break-in next time they were alone, about the theory assembling in his head, almost completed.

 _There's something in the woods_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been refraining from writing author's notes since it's my first time writing a mystery-esque piece of fiction and I despise spoilers. However, I'm curious about a few things:
> 
> What's going on with the Styles siblings, or between Liam and Zayn? Is Niall still alive? Is there something in the woods? And, of course, Larry are officially in action, mid-fic.
> 
> In this fic I'm focusing a lot on family relations and friendship and loyalty and there will be many parallels between both characters and situations. I hope I'm able to pull off all the different dynamics. Feedback is greatly appreciated x


	6. Baby doll

_FORGIVE US NOW FOR WHAT WE'VE DONE; IT STARTED OUT AS A BIT OF FUN_

* * *

 

Harry sat in his window when Louis came home. He didn't poise a joint as much as he clutched one, his bare legs icicles from the windowsill. When Louis appeared in the opposite bedroom, he reached back to flick the blinds, once, then took another drag. His eyes didn't leave Louis.

_Come._

One week without contact. A single word.

Another text rolled in and Harry, swaying out over the lawn, stepped back inside. The blinds flickered one time. Smoke plumed from an ashtray.

_Mum is drunk. Go through the back. I'll let you in._

The kitchen didn't sport towers of liquor when Harry let him in. They treaded upstairs, and Louis snuck a view of the blaring telly, Mrs Styles bathing in the light of it. Whatever liquor hadn't been used for the party, it had been emptied at her hand.

The ambience darkened without the adolescent presence the party had bestowed. Laughter a pitch too high no longer rang out in the broad hallways. The lack of photographs on walls or atop chiffoniers shone blunter than ever.

Had Louis been here at all, other than to attend parties or clean them up?

Harry's bedroom amplified his sweetly stale smell, bordering an aroma and a stench depending on where you sat. Louis took the bed, on crimped duvets and ignored homework.

A crash harrowed from downstairs, glass and glass, a thump.

Whereas Louis flinched, Harry sealed his hands over the window nooks, then leaned out. Face and neck curved to the starless skies, head dangling, he tipped his feet up some. The rest of his body slid an inch. Coming back down, he fumbled next to him, eyes closed while the blood ran from his brain. He was out of joints.

Louis hadn't ever seen him so bleak.

For a while, it seemed Harry pondered his decision to call Louis over. Louis hadn't imagined their reunion like this, hadn't reckoned they would need a reunion to start with. His muscle memory attempted to jerk him off the bed, press Harry to him, reconcile whatever mounted between them, between Harry and the rest of the world.

Louis batted away his small voice for a casual tone, which only ended up a dimmed version of its usual cadence.

“I think Liam did it,” he said. The thought had yet to settle with him. He had believed solving part of the mystery would ease his mind, but solutions didn't taste fresh. They tasted of defeat.

“At least,” he continued, “He must have knowledge about it. There's too much suggesting it. When I've talked to Zayn we might... It might help Gemma?”

All he knew about her was the similar streaks she shared with Harry. Nothing about his current state reflected her.

Harry didn't process. His eyes scorched Louis.

“Gemma died.”

Louis' heartbeat careened, and exploded. That's when he realised he reacted to all the wrong things the statement suggested. He loathed himself for it.

His brain revved from the night's discoveries. The pieces slid together without thought.

Had Doniya slipped to Liam about the break-in? The plywood slab had been pushed back into place, but somewhere on the floor in the closet was still a box of bolts, knocked from the shelf. Someone might have watched them while they ransacked the house. They might have gotten too close to the truth and had to be parried.

To cover up a hitch in his breath, Harry huffed. He wasn't going to wait for Louis to deal with it. “Yeah, she... Fell down the stairs or some shit. That's what mum will say. And dad. And it's what—“

“It was an accident.”

Louis jerked his head to the doorway.

One of Mr Styles' hands steadied him against the wall. Several Heinekens dangled from the other, the bottles Mrs Styles had passed out with. It stunned Louis to see him so casual, all the handsome family features blunted in his gloomy face.

Harry's jaw set.

One look from his father gunned him down.

“Louis,” Mr Styles said. “It's a little late to visit.”

In his family, manners like _Sir_ or _Can someone please pass me the milk_ had never been part of the upbringing. If it had been, it would have prepared him for times like this.

Although feeling he did Harry a disservice by being polite, Louis said, “Yes Sir, I was just checking in on him.”

“We're quite fine. Quite busy. Take him home and go to bed.” The last bit was directed to Harry, who soothed a wounded lip.

Harry didn't answer him with _Sir_. Mr Styles left.

The underlying tang of detergent from upstairs consumed the kitchen, now that Louis had gotten used to the tickle of weed. Summer's last insects trilled for them on the patio. Inside, Mr Styles helped his wife into bed. He had taken Harry's phone.

Harry had a hard time looking at Louis, at anything but the dewy grass. Louis gave into his gut and pressed him close.

“Can I do anything?” he asked.

Harry just smelled his hair.

 

✘

 

Gemma's passing spread over Sunny High like the flu – first knitted into a circle of four, then riving all across the halls.

Louis got to know Gemma through her brief but profound legacy. About how she visited the nursery school where her father worked, sketching princesses to gift the kids with. About how she spoke to elderly patients at the hospital where her mother worked, ones that had no family or others who didn't remember theirs. About how studious and kind a soul she was, an asset to the school and a personification of the Sunny Hills model.

It all rang true to him. It didn't sit wrong. But no one spoke about her trembles or wounded skin. They must have known. Someone. Anyone. Doniya must have known.

And yet he was more nauseous by the fact that he knew more about the Styles family from her rumours than from Harry's mouth.

Flowers congregated from backyards and fields and the parish snipped from the church garden. Candlewicks flared next to the floral monuments all around town. One memorial had manifested on Louis' street, below a forgotten flyer of the Horans with Zayn and Liam as contacts at its bottom. Another flyer, this of Safaa Malik, hung next to it.

Mr Styles had brought the kids out of school one forenoon to grieve in the schoolyard at the eyes of ravenous students indoors. Some left their teddy bears at the assembly. Others had drawn her in a princess theme, their papers furling in the light downpour.

It was speeches from peers and staff and condolences from townsfolk. It was a garishly empty seat by Doniya in the cafeteria. It was Harry leaving mid-class and Louis finding him weeping in the toilet stalls. It was Liam inviting them to a movie night at the _Payne Casa_.

Louis had asked Zayn the question numerous times with varying sentence structures and choice of words. _The four of us will be spending an evening in his home? Is he inviting_ Harry _to his couch? In his house? Do you know if it's a hoax to poison us or if it's just reconciliation for being a royal dick?_

Zayn's replies, however, had been consistent.

 _Yes, go there_.

It was Louis easing his heart of the turbulent grief in his head and heart over a piece of chocolate-dappled Science homework on the kitchen table, where it smelled less of _home_ than upstairs.

Zayn, as the one inexorable piece in Louis' new life, reacted in expected frustration. It levelled into raw ire the moment Louis mentioned the Styles siblings.

“I'm not using her death to further my statement,” Louis said, even though that was exactly what he did, “But for fuck's sake, there's so many untold facts there! I hadn't expected you to overlook it.”

He couldn't give Zayn a chance to butt in, not now.

“This place my mum works at,” he said, then chose to skip the details; they'd had this conversation before – hell, Zayn had had this conversation _directly_ with Jay. “It's a whole secret affair – whoever is in charge paid her to keep quiet. _Bribery_ , does it ring a bell? The ties are too strong, there's no other way this fits together.”

Despite the onslaught of conviction in Louis' voice, Zayn let himself stay solid a while longer.

“It _has_ to be Sunny Hills, for them to keep a close eye on her. That would explain why Safaa was taken after Niall, wouldn't it?” Louis said, well aware of his need for caution as he rocketed forward. “Because you went looking for him, and they didn't want that, so they scared you off. They hadn't targeted children before, which just proves Niall and his family must have been another case, right? My theory is that whoever targeted all those other people and whoever targeted the Horans, they're different people, and they live close by.”

He quieted, added, “Mum told me they paid her, cash, so the perpetrators are wealthy. They are wealthy and they live here in Sunny.”

Here Zayn differed from Louis' expectance by placing a finger to his lips, which soon went to circle his temple.

“And you think it's Liam,” he said.

If Louis didn't know better, he would take the tone in his voice for accusation. If he hadn't felt the defeat of tasting answers last night, he wouldn't recognise the hack in Zayn's demeanour.

“I'm damn sure Liam is involved. Zee, I'm sorry, I really think he is.”

They packed up homework, abandoning it. They headed outside. Without the cloak of summer, the Tomlinson residence shone full its in shades of bile.

On their idle walk, Zayn fought with himself. It didn't take a sharp mind to percept the signs of bedlam, especially not when Zayn allowed it to spill into his gait and balled fists.

Leaves slicked their path, a substance similar to damp cardboard filaments. Autumn wiped the slate of town but forgot essentials. It unleashed a beast that uprooted every flicker of life where it stampeded. They edged over its teeth and slabs of carcass between; withering thickets, boughs splinted from nightly laments – it was always still in the day, somehow, as if the gusts were brought upon and withdrawn to broadcast the devastation for the sake of turmoil. When the snow came, it would be in ashes over these bones.

“It doesn't...” Zayn backtracked but pivoted his head from their feet and searched in the veiling mist. “If there are two different perpetrators, it would make sense for _our_ perpetrator to fend off prying folk, right? Believe me, Liam wouldn't act like he's acting if he had known about Gemma being murdered, or been in on it himself. He wouldn't be acting like this if he knew where Safaa was. He wouldn't. Or Doniya would have noticed.”

Louis recollected the hug she had shared with Gemma and caught himself imagining the Malik household sitting down for dinner, and what an adventure that would be. Doniya _would have_ noticed.

“Harry basically laughed at the fact that her death would be an accident. She had scratches on her arms, which I...” Louis swung himself around a lamppost, rephrasing when he caught up with Zayn. “They must have been self-inflicted, but something happened to her at Liam's. Harry won't tell me, so it has to be related to this. He isn't allowed to say anything.”

“And he and his parents can't say anything because Liam's family would bring hell if they ever divulged.”

As everything else they shared, it wasn't an absolute – it was a theory.

Louis said, “It's plausible.”

Zayn shook his head, burrowing into his scarf. “There's too much at stake to think clearly. This isn't the solution.”

“Might be one side to it.”

Zayn didn't have the energy to object.

At the end of the week, Louis followed Harry to Liam's _casa_. It had been too cold to do homework by the football pitch, so Louis had lagged in school, loitering on Zayn's desk and adjacent ones whilst Zayn outlined recent events for the school paper with colleagues.

Visiting the house when he had been invited stirred anxiety in Louis. By his side, Harry mirrored the sentiment.

The feel of it agitated him further when he tried the door handle to find it unlocked.

Amidst tubs of crisps and ice-embedded booze, Zayn sloped over the counter with a gin and tonic whereas Liam stood tall, towel slung across both shoulders and another cloth in his fist. Liam cleansed the kitchen cabinets and a blender from homemade salsa. The towel hadn't been made for broad shoulder like his. A pair of unnaturally disgraceful shorts bared a slash on his calf, which he winced over when shifting his weight.

It crossed Louis' mind to ask where Mr and Mrs Payne were, and where the Payne sisters were. He kept quiet.

Liam bumped fists with Harry across the counter. Louis sucked his lips in, searching Zayn's reaction, which turned out to be a flat stare and a leisure suck at his straw. Then he sidled over to a barstool.

Once Harry and Liam had discussed practise for ten minutes and Louis had tried Zayn's abandoned drink – he had moved on to something cheaper – Louis piped up, “So whose blood is this?” and gestured to the ever-dirty cupboards.

Liam shoved the salsa tub towards him. Louis dipped a finger.

“I've already decided on a film so just sit back, if you will,” Liam said, finishing off the white wood, “And enjoy.”

Harry raised a glass of water. “Thanks, mate.”

It bugged Louis how little he understood about their exchanges. It bugged him even more that Zayn didn't react in the slightest. It bugged him that Harry hadn't filled in the blanks.

The moment Liam turned away, Louis ducked his head into Harry's neck, hovering. “Do you have any weed?”

“You jumpy?” Harry ran a finger across the scar in his palm.

Liam forced a water bottle on Louis.

“Hey, can we borrow some of your pot?”

Liam had the decency to look abashed. He soon excused himself for upstairs. When he returned, he tossed a green bag to the counter.

“Roll it yourself.”

Harry's lithe fingers went to work. It stirred a certain remembrance in Louis, if not nostalgia. The night exploding, Harry's mouth, a jab of sulphur.

Gemma was dead. Louis had all right to suspect Liam. They were in the Paynes' lair.

He couldn't afford treading.

“You have the same dealer?” he asked.

Abashed once again, Liam made work of depositing all towels and cloths, slicing fresh fruit with his back to them. Before tonight, Louis wouldn't have taken Liam for the undignified type. Straight back, straight morals, straight goals. Not whoever this was.

Smoke wafted to Louis' face. Dropping a lighter back in a hidden pocket, Harry beckoned Louis closer, billowing smoke into hollowed hands, against his lips. Louis parted them the same he would in a kiss. It was over before he could enjoy it.

Zayn stabbed his straw into the bottom of a now empty cocktail. Multiple others lined the sink, along with other blenders.

“They do,” he said.

“Don't be a sourpuss,” Liam said, a stab even to Louis' ears.

The joint pressed into Louis' hand. Harry rolled another one.

Liam gauged them, sullen himself. “If you two are going to be shotgunning all night, take the couch.”

“Happy to,” Harry said.

When Louis turned to look, Harry was already staring.

Liam swore and whipped the towel back on his shoulder, spinning a cake out of the fridge. M&Ms embossed the swaybacked monster, too cold to emit any smell but chill.

Momentarily banished of the dead joy, he held it out as a trophy in the flare of sun outside. Striding, he said, “Waliyha made this.”

There was too much strained pride in his voice for Louis to pass it off. It seemed he held all other members of the Malik family higher than Zayn. Among all other things, this also frustrated Louis.

He smoked.

With inane gestures to the kitchen fan and the joint and not enough words to make sense of it, Liam exited with the cake. Not being polite enough to force a smile, Zayn swayed after him from the stool, tubs resting in his arms. Unlike Liam, he returned a moment later, his hands the only thing holding him upright in the doorway.

“She made it with Lottie,” he said. “Didn't you know?”

He straightened up and left without a reply.

Harry switched on the kitchen fan, flicking the smoke towards it. One of his arms weighed on Louis' shoulders. The cologne he wore ebbed away at the familiar scent.

Louis dabbed the joint in the sink, in bowls of failed salsa mixes and cornflaked yoghurt.

“So you're mates now?” he asked.

“Doniya,” Harry said, drifting towards the living room with Louis in his grasp. “I really have a lot to thank her for. So does Gemma.”

They slid into the space of the couch Liam had reserved, where he pressed up against the arm's rest. For a luxe living room, the seating was limited at best. Whilst the movie kick-started with a bludgeoning and Harry folded around him, Louis tried not to think about how casually Gemma was spoken of, as if she was old news. They didn't talk about Niall.

Zayn sprawled across the only armchair, simultaneously rejecting and drawing in the ottoman. The paisley upholstery stayed faithful to its wooden frame even as Zayn tried screwing and jerking his heel into it. Whereas the rest of them ate at the table, he brought a piece of cake with him to the armchair.

At darker scenes, the telly reflected the backyard and the shed that was too cramped for being a part of the vast property. Without the mist and mud, it was as inconspicuous as a flowerbed of petunias. Someone had cleaned the windows.

Louis stiffened, unable to turn around. Instead he gawked at it through the reflecting TV-screen, spoon strewing crusted chocolate across his lap. It didn't give anything. The shed didn't transform into a torture lair before his eyes. The sun sank below the horizon and left a wooden skeleton draped in decayed vines.

Something prodded against his lips. Eyes lazy on the rolling sex scene, Harry held a M&M to Louis' mouth, glancing off when he didn't eat it. Louis blinked. He picked the chocolate from his lap and curling up, let Harry feed him. Somewhere deep, his heartbeat hitched.

Liam relocated to a second armchair he lifted across the room, muscles sharp in the evening glow.

Louis couldn't quite recall if Harry's eyes had ever been this clear. He brushed his knuckles along Harry's jaw, voice quiet.

“Are you planning on watching?”

Hot air skimmed across his fingers in way of reply. Harry pressed the pads of them to his mouth. Louis fought back an impulse to withdraw from the harsh intimacy. It only amplified the speed of his thoughts.

Zayn signed the universal proclamation of _taking a piss_ and trudged off. He went in the opposite direction of the bathroom.

Disengaging himself from Harry with a muted excuse, Louis trailed after, hands hot and head a hurricane.

“Toilet is over—“ A pair of sock-clad feet poked from behind the counter. “What's up?”

Zayn rose, dipped low, murmured. He rested on the floor. “I'm praying. It's praying time.”

Quiet conversation sounded from the living room, so Louis leaned back and watched. Bits unfolded before him in lives all around, all at once, and he hadn't been paying attention. For some reason, this didn't frustrate him.

Zayn's susurrated words dimmed the surrounding din, for a while.

The buzz of actors on the telly soon resumed. The kitchen fell silent. Zayn slumped back on the counter and beckoned Louis to do the same. He played with a bottle of flat soda.

“You're not getting wasted tonight. This is a movie night,” Louis said. “At _Liam's_.”

“I _am_ getting wasted because I'm anxious as fuck. If you mind then don't look.”

Louis didn't mind. He skinned his lip.

“Do you believe me?” he asked. “About Liam? If you're having second thoughts I'll lure him off and show you the closet under the stairs.”

Zayn drank. “It's plausible.”

“' _Plausible_ '? This is the closest to a fully-fledged theory we've had since the start! Doesn't it at least deserve some recognition?”

“I'm in love with him.”

Their propinquity pronounced the citrus in Zayn's exhales, but Louis wasn't breathing. The confession struck him as a possible reason to withhold information. To lead the suspicion astray. Much to his surprise, this didn't vex him.

Not connecting the dots sooner, did.

“But Doniya—“

“It happened before. Not much _happened_. I wanted it to.”

Everything spun. Hadn't he known somehow? Of course he hadn't.

Just like with seeing Liam and Doniya, something vile towered in the back of his mind, but before crashing down, it came over him that Zayn could have told him, could have mentioned it in passing, could have prevented _this_ , could have avoiding stalling their so-called investigation. For all he knew about possible paths they could have gone down, Niall could be back with them. They could be at an evening in, hosted by the Horan son, and he wouldn’t know.

“So it wasn't mutual?” he said, veins hot under his skin.

“Don't make me— It's been ages, I just want to get over it. Don't fucking make me—“

“I won't,” Louis said. “I just don't understand why you're keeping this shit from me.”

“Now I'm not. I didn't realise you were asking.”

There was something solemn in Zayn's tone, violently askew with the rest of his figure.

Blood puffed from the slits in Louis' lip. He spoke with restraint.

“I told you, 'Zayn, I think Liam's put Niall in a ditch'. I said, 'Zayn, I broke into Liam's house, and also, I believe he's bribing my mum'. So why aren't we holding him at gunpoint right now? Where are his sisters? What are his parents up to? They don't seem to be home a whole lot.”

Zayn swallowed, eyes either solid on the counter, or distant. “You said it. This is a movie night. At _Liam's_. And I'm not looking to stir up hell tonight at this truce.”

Louis released a fist he didn't know was clenched. Blood dotted his palm. Before he could touch his lip, more of it bubbled from his reopened slash.

The parts of the frustration that hadn't stitched into his psyche vanished. Bitterness flooded his mouth. It seared on his tongue.

“Can you just trust me on this?” he asked, mollifying the words best he could. It _was_ a movie night. And this was Zayn, so he couldn't hold a grudge either way.

Zayn suckled on the cap of the water bottle for a second. “I am trusting you. I'm not... I feel for Niall. This isn't hindering anything.”

Cautiously, Louis rose, head spinning more from surges of blood than unanswered questions.

Zayn lingered. Lending a hand, Louis helped hauling him up.

Zayn said, “Are you keeping an eye on him?”

“Are you keeping an eye on Liam?”

Zayn shook his head, jabbing the bottle into Louis' chest, smile a slight curve on his face. “Fuck you.”

Harry was unassuming as always when Louis joined him after escorting Zayn to the armchair. Liam feasted on his second – third? – slice of cake. Every other minute, he lulled off. Other times Louis would throw an eye and find him rigid, skull and ears jutting from the elongated backrest, eyes sleepless for days.

“I'm sure he'll rewind if you want.”

Louis glanced to Harry, registering. With an enlightened _oh_ he sank deeper into the seat, saying, “I've already seen this.”

“Yeah?”

Louis shrugged, a small motion. “Yeah, it's classified as an indie thriller. I have to see it.”

“Then you won't mind if we...”

A thumb and a ringed finger tilted his head sideways, barely a change, to dust a kiss on his neck. It tickled the tufts of baby hair there. Their legs layered. Their skin flared. While Harry bussed a path to his mouth, Louis held his head in a mound of curls, thoughts slowing only to race thrice as fast a lick later.

Zayn's reprimand stayed with him, an echo of Niall's desires. _Keep an eye on him. Keep an eye on him. Keep an eye on him._

Busy gathering his breath in the pulsating space between them, without piquing Liam's attention, or Zayn's, for that matter, Louis made sense of the mantra.

“Can you invite me over later this week?” he asked. One of his hands stirred the sun-slicked tops of Harry's hair, wanting, searching.

Harry found a lost M&M to feed him. “Should I let you in through the front door or are you feeling keen on climbing the window?”

 

✘

 

Louis didn't get a chance to climb through any windows.

When the day came, a text in the AM told him to stay put, that he would be escorted. The living room blared with a cartooned TV-series Lottie had convinced their mum was for kids, which happened to be well-known for its vulgarity and gore. Now that Jay wasn't home, and Louis was itching for company, she watched it without guilt.

During the wait, Louis rummaged the kitchen cabinets, obtaining mismatched brands of biscuits and a forgotten dish featuring minced meat and fruit tucked in the fridge. At one point he had waved a massacred cucumber in Lottie's face; she had recoiled, fingers twisted into a banishing cross.

There had been a hassle of finding date-worthy clothing and pair up garments that didn't make him look like a Ken doll in a six-year-olds possession – spring had brought a range of bolder fashion choices for him that his old friends were keen on nailing onto him – given that his sartorial repertoire had been clipped by Lottie stealing many of the golden acts.

In the end, date-worthy clothing hadn't been a choice, so he had assembled accidentally bleached jeans and one of his father's threadbare tees he knew Harry liked for unknown reasons. Slouching at the table or bristling through the kitchen presented a perfect view of the Styles residence and the everlasting street, rocketing into abysmal darkness, the brink of wood somewhere beyond.

A Honda's headlights kindled what little life remained in the neighbourhood. Louis signalled for his sister to shut the program off, which she did in a flurry of taps to the remote before bolting to the kitchen table and stealing the newspaper and a seat. For his own behalf, he leaned back on the counter, arms folded. At the last second, he flipped the paper Lottie held so it read correctly.

Jay disclosed an aura of equal parts urgency and joy, her hand a ghostly yet grounding touch to her throat where veins and moles awoke with the passing years. When she barraged the kitchen, she was a sergeant sporting a floral outfit made for billowing in vast fields on a movie screen, not the dead gusts of rural October. Through silent communication, Lottie obtained her purse and Louis poured her a glass of flat soda.

“Fat work bonus?” he asked in regards to her dress.

“Date bonus,” his mother answered.

The siblings exchanged looks.

“It isn't anyone from work,” Jay said, handing back the soda with a questionably unsettled expression, “And it was quite sudden, which is why you haven't been given a heads-up.”

They spared their praise and goodwill. Something uncertain hung over her. Since Lottie kept fake-reading the newspaper with practised nonchalance, Louis spoke up.

“Terrific, of course. So what's it mean for us?”

“You need to stay here with Lottie.”

While Louis didn't move, his eyebrows did.

“Funny you should be mentioning _dates_ when I've scheduled plans for today,” he said with a gesture to a calendar on the wall, too large for its own good. He had been the one to flip months, after having it broadcast June for months.

Jay put some bills on the table. Lottie's eyes darted up.

“I know, love, but he can come here, can't he? I just need you to be all eyes and ears when I can't.”

She didn't say _given what's happened in the neighbourhood_ lately, nor did she have to. He found it droll that he was opted out of actively pursuing the abductors, to passively defending a battle fated to be lost, at home.

“I—“

Jay had already dressed and drunk stale Cola straight from the bottle, had received the treacherous kind of hype pummelling into you and leaving no chance of failure. She had received it for the first time in years.

Louis couldn't take this from her.

Although not surrendering, he resumed his arm-folded stance against the sink. A glance outside informed him of Harry striding up the walkway, clothed about as gracefully casual as Louis and nurturing something in his hands.

Vile ire reared its head at the remembrance of a golden opportunity lost. He didn't listen to whatever his mother said next, perceiving key words he couldn't piece together – like _pizza_ and _safety_ _–_ and moreover, he didn't listen to the noises she made assembling herself until Harry's drawl brought him back.

Louis couldn't take this from her but _he needed to_.

“Your escort is here!”

Harry's head crowned in the doorway before the words had been uttered. Partly withered roses sprouted between his hands, still earthy from being torn from the backyard soil.

Despite himself, Louis felt charmed. He couldn't dismiss Lottie's presence though, so when Harry leaned in, petals ruffled against their chests, Louis ducked into the crook of his neck. Harry got the hint and broke from the one-armed embrace.

Jay shouted goodbye and bounded off in her high heels. The Honda revved off.

“Next time I'll take you out,” Harry said, taking the lean at the sink while Louis attempted potting the flowers. “There's a local restaurant here – seafood specials mostly, some quarry from the hunters beyond the woods. Supposedly it's romantic.”

Lottie was one of the brighter eleven-year-olds Louis knew. But being an eleven-year-old, all socials bits hadn't fallen into place, so when she pleated the newspaper and opened her mouth, his heart thudded for two.

“Hi, Harry.”

A slow smile. “Hey.”

And then, with more delicacy than Louis would ever be able to muster, she asked, “When is the funeral?”

In a discreet motion, Harry's shoulders drew up to his ears, crossed arms pressing in on himself.

Louis busied himself with the roses. Dirt and wind had weathered the crown to dull shades bordering ailing browns. He lend a hand for Harry to hold.

“Sunday,” was all Harry said, and at that point it crossed Louis' mind how much Gemma had mattered to the both of them, how much she had mattered to so many people in so many different ways.

It was too sudden to bear.

Louis left the bouquet. He dug his fingers into the crow's foot on the back of Harry's hand. They crossed the kitchen.

“We're staying here tonight,” he said. To Lottie, “Mum said something about dinner, right? Work it out.”

“Louis, I can't...” She crimpled the paper, pushed it aside. “I don't know how this stove plays.”

“Work it _out_.”

It took her a moment to form a reply. It was plenty of time for Louis to grit his teeth.

“Mum said to either heat up pizza or go out and eat and you—“

“I don't give a shit,” Louis snarled, “What 'mum said', all right? Stop being so fucking childish and deal with it like the rest of us.”

Lottie didn't say anything.

Louis exited the room.

Beyond the doorway, just out of sight, Harry laid a hand on his chest, somehow pushing him back whilst just touching the chips of superheroes coming apart on Louis' shirt. Revealing himself again, he dropped his voice an octave, fuelling himself with her beaten expression. “Can you just stop taking my fucking stuff?”

Harry lagged behind a few moments before following him upstairs.

Harry didn't complain about the underlying scent of _home_ still in Louis' room. He didn't rest his attention on misplaced garments or the collection of vintage perfumes in one of the shelves. He didn't mention the pin board of scattered clues.

Even so, Louis opened the window. They lounged on his bed, knee to knee, head propped in hands, their questions wide open but unspoken. Louis didn't know if it was bad manners to not bring up Gemma, or acting out his own irritation.

_What do you want to talk about? What happened to Gemma? Why do you know Niall?_

_Do you want to find him?_

“Pardon me if I'm just too dumb to clue in,” Louis said and Harry scrunched his nose, “But who's your dealer?”

“Doniya.”

Louis snorted. “Figures.” He took Harry's hands in his. _Don't mention Gemma._ The band-aid he had put on his palm scraped against chapped knuckles. “What _is_ Halloween Run?”

Harry grinned. While he explained a rehearsed version of its history, which Liam must have foisted on him, his bruise-dappled limbs drew Louis in. Fingers idly raked over his spine, or pressed into the dip of clashing joints on his wrist. They tasted of soil against his lips. Louis discerned something about cardio and replied with a chaste chuckle to Harry's clavicles.

In Harry's mouth, each phrase was a term of endearment.

It was soft as the transition from waking to sleeping to dreaming, Louis understood, then. It wasn't a matter of crossing borders or redefining already experienced sensations and it had none of its fuzz. It was _this_.

“ _Vous me plaisez_ ,” he said at the end of the story.

He felt Harry smile into his hair, mid-inhale. “Yeah?”

“You brought me _roses_.”

“I'm so sorry.”

The smiles turned into laughter, which was followed slow kissing. Where Harry's hands sank onto his back, he felt dust and sore cuticles, raw and unforgiving. They were kings in this suburban night. Each desolate lane formed a treacherous river to be tamed. Each rooftop an elevated playground. Unbreakable. Louis wanted to smash something.

Guilty by the realisation rocketing by the depths of his mind, Louis buried himself further in Harry.

“This is too inconvenient,” he said and hoped Harry hadn't heard him. Withdrawing just enough to speak, he said, “Tell me you've got condoms hidden somewhere 'cause I'm out.”

Harry didn't look abashed in the slightest. “How can you be _out_?”

Moreover, the question held a striking amount of surprised lust that only further crushed Louis' spirits. Of all the factors he could have miscalculated, this evening had struck every chord.

“I like to use them,” he said. “It's not like I'm gonna do it by the toilet each time.”

Expecting mocking in some form, he groused when Harry's hands cupped his shoulder blades, this harsh gravity. His neck split with kisses.

“I've thought of this,” Harry said.

If he said it in consolation, it didn't help.

Louis held his face for a second, soaked up the riveting need etched all over it. So fucking _inconvenient_ , and Louis couldn't make himself see the silver lining. Desiring, he also understood, established solid boundaries between _before_ and _after_. Louis wasn't willing to cross over into grey territory.

“I know,” he said, and repeated it into Harry's mouth.

Somehow, Harry looked even more fired up.

Against his better judgement, Louis treaded the waters.

“What have you thought about?”

“I can't say.”

“So it's kinky.” Unable to tell whether Harry was stringing him along or being plain serious, Louis went ahead. “I mostly think about kissing you. Sometimes I jack off thinking about you.”

“All the time,” Harry said in a breath. “I always think about you.”

Louis unzipped his jeans. The pale skin of Harry's abdomen fluttered below his hovering palm, so he moved to chuck his own trousers best he could with Harry still holding him down. They caught at his knees. He exhaled a laugh.

One overwhelming imagination in particular had been similar to this: sans a milieu, with or without the whisper of conversation around them, or an album of last decade's pop hits, but always with bundled clothes and fervour, suckling on swollen lips glazed in sweat.

With the lines of fantasy and reality blurring, Louis asked, “Can you touch yourself?”

Whereas his own movements were steadfast, Harry's scattered in doubtful bursts. A fist tore chips from Louis' superhero tee bundled in a fist. It was a pleasure greater than revving on a desolate highway with an electric beat as your pacemaker, greater than waking up to damp sheets and shameful euphoria, greater now with Harry stealing his breath and clinging to him.

“Louis.” It sounded akin to concern for everyone but himself, then Louis whined and fit his fingers into Harry's disjointed jerks. “ _Louis_.”

It was dirt-mangled sweat and filthy prayers. Louis battled with the need to correct Harry's slightly off motions and amplify the sensations. He wanted to feel what Harry felt while jerking off. So he left it be, and when it was over they kissed and smeared fingers across hipbones and cheeks.

Wrist aching from the malicious angle, he let Harry put it to his mouth. He thought about how oddly quiet this Harry had been compared to the boy in his head. It wasn't as if he had been straining to keep it in, either. Perhaps it had been years of raptor-eared parents or shared bedrooms. Louis was struck by how luxurious his teen years had been so far.

“Had you thought about that?” Louis asked.

Harry peered up over the slack arm, eyes dulled by satisfaction. He didn't say anything.

Thinking back on it that night, skin to skin, Louis reckoned he didn't have to.

 

✘

 

The words _Louis William_ woke him up. It came to him before the musty scent of used sheets one would often encounter during summer, before the realisation that he was alone in the bed, and before recognising it as his mother's _Louis William_ and therefore recognising it as trouble. It was always _Louis William_ , never with a _Tomlinson_ tacked on. There wasn't much pride in carrying his father's surname. _William_ had been his mother's choice.

Louis encountered the trouble by the foot of his bed. A silhouette wavered in the doorway – Lottie – but she didn't enter the room nor paid much outward attention to the situation within.

Whatever was about to tumble over him, Louis could conclude this: punishments or anything that could alter his mundane routines shouldn't be discussed in bed.

Although being aware of this rule, Jay asked, “Is Harry abusive?”

“Mum, Harry is the sweetest guy. He's, like, _Zayn-level_ caring.”

“Let me elaborate.” When she sat down on the comforter – Louis prayed he had wiped clean the few remains from Harry's visit – he backed up against the wall. Lottie definitely wasn't giving them her eyes now. “You let Lottie go out on her own. It was pitch black outside, and all restaurants are on the opposite side of town. And when she came home—“

Louis willed himself to stop listening there. The sentence lived its own life in his head.

“So I'm asking you,” Jay said, as much caution in her voice as there was disbelief, and she eyed his tee, “Does Harry hurt you?”

By then Louis realised the caution wasn't reserved for him; it was for Lottie. Much like lashing out had done the previous evening, this wounded him. In his head resonated the fact that Zayn would have been a better son – _was_ a better son, regardless of posters and small talk.

Therefore he said, “We're out of condoms,” and braced for the deepening blow.

“Louis,” she said with an unspoken _William_ following, “I'm not bashing you for enjoying yourself. Lottie was alone for hours. Once she's safe at home, she hears you. It sounds like you're in pain. She was alone for hour 'till I came home and found her, huddling in the living room. She hadn't eaten.”

The silhouette in the doorway had ebbed away. The tee was too large on his frame, yet its collar warped his throat.

He swallowed. “You saying she couldn't guess what the noises might have been?”

“Two minors have disappeared. One of her friends died last week. She's eleven and she's _your responsibility_ when I can't care for her.”

“I told you I would have company.”

Sweat slighted the hollow below his mouth. Shame gouged his eyes, rotted his veins. Somewhere behind was a brittle voice ordering him to _shut up shut up shut up_.

Jay had softened her voice when she spoke. “You're aware that I have to ground you, aren't you?”

“Yes.”

She got off the bed. Only when she left did he pick up on her fragrance; it was his favourite one of the vintage collection they shared.

“I'll buy more condoms after work, okay? Tell me which brand and I'll fix it. As long as you tell me you were safe.”

He had to close his eyes as to not cut himself on her raw kindness. “We were safe.”

The rest of the morning and majority of the afternoon, Louis spent in bed drying his eyes and texting Harry about the current situation. It hadn't gone long enough to make fun of things, so Louis kept the information clipped, the way he knew Harry would understand. Then he texted Zayn about the same matter, waiting for Harry's reply.

 _Partial_ , was the only answer when Louis explained the reasons behind the curfew.

 _Your sister is a drug dealer_ , he wrote.

Zayn texted, _My sister is missing_.

Louis didn't text anyone after that.

At dinner it occurred to him that Harry might still be without phone. Mr Styles could have it locked up in the attic or basement, or carrying it on him like a golden key. Louis went up to his room and flicked the blinds a few times. On the other side, light pumped back.

Gemma's funeral was the sole exception of the curfew.

A solid nuance of black resonated in the church. It dusted the flowers on the closed casket, allaying once hot marble and straightening dog-eared hymnaries. Notable families with chandelier light waltzing on their mournful shoulders bowed their heads in condolence. Sans their daughters, the Paynes took the brunt of the incense up front, and Mrs Payne assisted the priest from time to time, as discreet as the tears on her cheeks. When she sat down, it was next to Mrs Styles.

Choir singing fluttered the copper-tinged air, and as the nuances of black amplified in the reception, pastries and nutty coffee beat against the arid baulks and stone. The kernel of the parish had taken to cater the mass. Most of the praise had been stored for this moment, bland recollections of her existence.

Throughout the reception, Harry's expression shifted from apathy to anger to anguish. Many had waited in the civic hall for the Styles. Banners that previously read _Bring them home_ now sported inconspicuous hand-sewn décor. Beneath black collars shone silver crosses, and Harry kept torqueing the one he wore as if he limited all emotions to that single motion, afraid of detonating.

Zayn's and Liam's families hovered by one another, sometimes veering out to exchange Mrs Styles handkerchief for an immaculate, or offer Mr Styles another cuppa. Despite longing gazes from Liam, Doniya stood firm by her brother's side.

Louis recalled how he had once seen the sisters as saplings in a gale-trapped wood, and now realised how that had been a false observation. They were the trunks.

Waliyha and Lottie, along with their peers, passed time on the hills outside. Zayn had gestured for Louis to accompany them and joined himself soon after. Louis reckoned he would take on any task that didn't include Liam's participation.

The pebbled walkway scuffed behind them, and shortly after Harry's presence was added to the guard. Louis noted the red mark of a chain around his throat.

“Can I do anything?”

“It's nothing. I bruise easily.”

The children wheeled in high grass, uncut for the sake of boundaries between the vast tree-tinged fields. Leaves were heaped and launched at each other. Above everything stood the three of them, still in the lethal embrace of October.

Zayn beckoned the closest flock of kids back into the rectory. The formation of boys remained intact as three distinct shapes broke from the wall of trees at the foothill. All in rags, with skin matching the watery bark.

Niall Horan strode up the hill.


	7. Follow fashion

_IN THIS TWILIGHT, HOW DARE YOU SPEAK OF GRACE?_

* * *

 

Louis couldn't find his notebook.

It wouldn't have been such a travesty, since Zayn had most of the info down, but for the past few nights, Louis had scrawled in ludicrous theories and attempts at evidence that would tie Liam and the rest of the Payne clan to the abduction. Many of them hadn't been given a chance to enter the pinboard. Many of them had been concocted in between classes in disjointed sentences and key words.

None of them had involved victims returning, let alone victims returning without testimonies, without concrete descriptions of their abductors.

Fetching the mail or glancing off the telly out the windows always startled him. Rakes clearing the grounds. Metal and crockery polished. Curtains shivering in the windows. Long cuts along Mrs Horan's forehead. Scabs on Mr Horan's. Niall's willowy back weaving through the house, grasping a phone or the end of a vacuum.

Louis mulled his inability to find the notebook at Zayn's desk in school while the latter tapped away at an interview made with the Horans. After returning, Mr Horan had shaken his hand and said something that could only be praise given how Zayn's demeanour slackened. Praise, Louis learnt later, about holding the fort in his absence. An intern and his mentor.

Zayn hadn't been to worry about the disappearance.

“Stop dwelling on Liam's involvement. Niall's back. Don't you figure he would have protested some by now if Liam had abducted him?”

There was another impossible fact. Niall is back.

Rumours about the cancelling of Halloween Run rekindled. At first, it had been pure speculation among the student body, until it ramped up in outer social circles as a fact. Niall settled the matter with his flyer-worthy smile, ghostly with the remembrance of his wake still raw.

“It will do us no good if we give in to fear. Besides, traditions aren't without reason, are they?”

Other than from various newspapers nationwide, Louis hadn't had any contact with any of the Horans. The infinitesimal slice of him hoping for a happy ending had assumed they would be back on roofs and howling through streets, since Niall always had Liam in tow as Louis suspected the situation had been before. There had been glances, moments where Louis would grasp for words but settle for silence.

_Guess you aren't really mates._

From time to time, Zayn would be added to the entourage, but he mostly kept to himself. It took Louis quite a while to figure out why he might be down and out, and when he saw the manky flyer of Safaa outside his house, he cursed himself.

The trio approached Louis one lunch. In the faces of his peers, Louis recognised the relief in seeing a chafing irregularity restored. Beyond Niall's steely charisma was physical labour and calculated motion. Louis couldn't fit in their sphere.

“How do you know him?” Louis asked upon sighting them.

Harry scrunched a juice carton, thumbing liquid from his lip. “We go way back.” In a disjointed afterthought, he added, “I like Zayn. Why aren't you interested in him?”

“If you're asking platonically, I am. I'm interested in both of them. Friendships aren't exclusive.”

At the same time as Zayn seated himself at the table, Niall beckoned Louis to stand. Then they hugged. The notes of fir and spicy jasmine Louis associated with him still lingered, nudging against unknown scents.

Louis opened his eyes to the cafeteria.

Liam looked at him, and it wasn't anything. The heat in his eyes had ashened. Nothing remained. On the side, Harry offered Zayn quiet conversation along with a pallid apple. Lately, everything came to him in pastels.

“I take it we're all friends now?” Niall said.

Louis held him for a beat too long. He wasn't a ghostly version of his former self. He was Niall. And he was back.

“We're all friends,” Liam said. His forearms met the table and he took a biscuit Zayn had left.

Does Niall know about them?

Apt hands seized Louis' shoulders and Niall gauged him.

“You didn't take me for a dead man, did you?”

Sitting back down, Louis narrowly avoided Zayn stabbing a spoon into some yoghurt. Specks of it coated the table. Harry looked impressed. He also looked as if he wanted to dab some of the yoghurt below Zayn's dark eyes.

A thought crossed Louis' head, and he appraised it before saying, “Suppose the suburbs aren't quite safe, either.”

Niall gave a neutral smile.

“Come to my 'welcome back' party in the woods this weekend. Don't bother with heavy clothing; bonfires are part of the composition. A lot of space for boyfriends and weed. It'll be a stretch of summer.”

Liam dusted crumbs off his fingers and straightened back up, blanched by his surroundings. Somehow, Louis couldn't imagine him and Niall on a roof, or Zayn and Niall going on midnight. He felt foolish for ever having doubted Niall's commitment to him, the interest in Horan's broad welcome to the neighbourhood.

“I'll bring the good mood,” Louis said, though he knew everything would be catered to before he even smelled the pines.

With a hinted roll of his shoulders, Niall resumed his omniscient role after being a chafing irregularity for so long, finally in place.

“There's no place like home,” he said. “Harry, those tattoos look bitching.”

Harry's nod was terse.

Something like a reminder flashed in Liam's eyes before they trailed out of the cafeteria. Someone gave Niall a handshake and a flyer – Louis recognised her as one of Zayn's colleagues at the school paper.

In their wake, Harry toyed with Louis' fingers. Calves bumped under the table. Fir and jasmine still shrouded Louis' head. He sealed his soft smile with a sigh.

Telling Harry about the missing notebook didn't earn a reaction much different from Zayn's.

“Forget about the... theories. This is my property. It gives me the right to be upset when it's MIA. My other stuff is missing too.”

Zayn piqued an interest. The stirring of his spoon slowed. “Like what?”

“Like my clothes. I can never look decent anymore, let alone be comfortable.”

Harry said, “Wasn't that on Lottie?”, at the same time as Zayn finished off the yoghurt and said, “I say you look _bitching_.”

“She's—“ Pausing before chugging his water, Louis then slid the glass away. His phone rang. “No, I reckon it wasn't.”

The conversation carried on without him in terms of sock goblins and other mythical creations and tattoos – Zayn rolled up his sleeve, “I bought a few bitching ones for my birthday”. Jay asked his name on the other end of the line.

“Yeah, mum?”

Jay stilled her voice before speaking.

_“Love, listen to me. The situation is dealt with and it's been solved, so don't panic.”_

Louis didn't succeed in keeping his reply even. “Okay.”

_“Someone tried to take Lottie, just outside a while ago. Right on our street. I would have called sooner but I didn't want to say anything until we were sure of the outcome.”_

Without announcing his departure, Louis left the table. The cafeteria mangled to a drab backdrop while he tore through it. The entrance opened and shut just as he passed, raw air tickling his throat and eyes. If he focused on moving, he wouldn't have to process the information right away.

“How could they try to take her?” he decided to start with. “How did— Why didn't it work? It's always worked in the past. She can't have been the first in four years...”

For a moment, the crackling line suffocated Jay's breaths. Ducking into a toilet stall, Louis yanked out paper from the machines and let it soak in icy water. He pressed them to his face.

 _“It seemed they were rushing.”_ She must have sat down, for her voice regulated once more after a clipped sigh. Someone watched TV in the adjacent room. _“In broad daylight, it's good to hurry. Several neighbours and I heard her screaming. You know, she fought. That self-defence class paid off.”_

A miscalculated snatching.

The overwhelming smell of detergent cancelled out traces of urine, yet Louis let some of the soap spill to the clinker, scuffing it in with his heel. Miscalculated meant witnesses, and witnesses meant explicit detail. None of the abysmal leads he called facts. This wasn't abstract anymore.

He said, “What did she see? What did any of you see?”

_“You have to walk her to and home from school every day, okay? Can we agree on that?”_

Tufts of paper joined the foamy mess.

“Yes. Didn't you see faces or...” The line remained a susurration of voices and breathing and cutlery. “She's okay?”

_“She's home. I'm with her.”_

Louis finished the call. He breathed. Mr Malik's shriek tore through his head.

He lifted his chin.

The mirror displayed the boy he had left in the city. It wasn't a lesser version than his current being, only unwelcome. Boisterous bar fights passed with his friends hadn't succeeded in jading him. Neither had witnessing adultery in a car parked on his street. Neither had distracting Lottie with old comics while the neighbours smashed plates against the wall. It had only made him brittle.

On the wall behind him, adhesive carried a poster with details of the Halloween Run. Horns and trident tails had been added to the letters afterwards.

Telling Zayn could be dangerous, for himself more than for Louis. They needed an upswing. Louis wasn't sure if he could bear this without Zayn as crutch.

Exiting the toilets, the nausea he had held back overcame him, and with it a realisation. It didn't worry him how Zayn would suffer. Only the dilemma whether or not Louis could live with himself if he looked Zayn in the eye and said that his sister had made it where Safaa hadn't, and why that was a good thing.

Harry had left the table when Louis returned.

“He said to send you kisses,” Zayn said, leafing through his journal. It wasn't his beaten one with his initials carved in the leather. Louis wasn't sure what to make of that.

Zayn lifted his gaze, adding, “I'm not sending you kisses.”

Louis nodded. He dampened his lips.

“They tried to abduct Lottie.”

The flapping of paper stopped. Zayn closed the journal.

“Tried,” Louis said with another nod. “I know. It failed.” Garnering the courage to meet Zayn's eyes, he found them serene. “What does that mean?”

“I think it's time we visit that mansion of yours,” Zayn said.

“How?”

“I'll figure it out. Doniya could— Actually, if we can lure away my parents for a night I can borrow the car. They're quite watchful about property, in general.”

“What if we're already gone?”

Zayn's gaze sharpened. Louis picked with his cutlery without intention of eating.

“What if you come pick me up and I'll ride along with you to Niall's party?”

Across the pallid stretch of Zayn's mouth, a smile formed, equally wan to the rest of his demeanour. A fracture in ice.

“Good call, Tomlinson.”

They helped cleaning the table of the mess Harry had left behind – Louis said something about how the clutter could in no way compare to Lottie's regular dumps at home, in hopes of seeing that smile again. But during the brisk walk between cafeteria and school, Zayn had a scarf tossed over his mouth, gait steady and betraying his outward lassitude.

Despite the progress and sheer luck in the recent events, the sickness kept swelling and subsiding with Louis. He did his best to break free from the shell of a city boy clawing at him.

“Just, why Midsummer Manor?” he asked. “Why now?”

“Four years of solely abducting adults and they go after our sisters, right after Niall has come back.”

They had already established that it was personal. Louis opened his mouth to point out that fact when Zayn said, “And now we're getting closer to something huge. That's why they need us gone – why they need Lottie and Safaa gone.”

“I think there's something in the woods,” Louis said.

“Then you better come to the party in gloves and boots. This might be dirty.”

 

✘

 

The clearing between ambitiously post-it marked dictionaries and hidden erotica filled with bodies in neon tights and saggy sweaters. The AC had broken right before the latest class, resulting in various interventions by librarians, self-proclaimed handymen, the school's janitor, and after it all the broken AC remained for the scheduled self-defence class during the following evening.

That hadn't been a pleasant hour for Louis.

Curfew didn't hinder him idling in school to study, only him studying on other grounds. He had hoped to hear more about Zayn's plot as to be in some state of mental preparation when it was sprung upon him at the fete. Zayn had other plans in mind.

As it turns out, school offered little but solitude for him. He had never been a big fan of solitude. He treasured accompanying Lottie to class and observing general techniques and Holly Round's supple figure floating beneath tawny lights.

Liam, too, was an avid observer, his silence levelling Louis'. Zayn was only silent.

Louis ducked over an elderly woman in slumber and tapped Zayn's head.

He said, “Anything more detailed about the raid, I'd appreciate to know in advance.”

“Noted.”

“Do you have anything now?”

Zayn gave him a look. “Come back tomorrow.”

Louis straightened into his seat.

Metal crunched to his right in hands made of grass and dirt-ridden nails and expensive lotion. Liam brought a Monster to his lips, lingered as his eyes burned into Doniya's stretched back, then lowered it. Craters formed at his fingertips. It was the most alive Louis had seen him since the movie night at the Payne casa.

On the way home, the Tomlinson siblings didn't hold hands. Aside from the guilt on Louis' part and the trauma of survival on Lottie's, the night was unforgiving on lost boys and girls. Lottie expressionlessly traipsed along slippery railings, across puddles, betwixt damp shrubs. The gym bag she had consensually borrowed from her brother ticked against her hip, keys and water bottle clicking. The initials on the side read LT.

When she made an effort to climb the stonewalls around the church, Louis grumbled. She launched a fistful of moss to the asphalt.

Clinks echoed in the street.

It wasn't the jarring sound of keys to a lamppost, or an escaped coin scuttling into black oblivion, or buckles of shoes scraping over manholes. It was the sound of deliberate destruction.

The clinks came closer, or they neared them. Louis didn't want to think about it.

He seized Lottie. “Where's it coming from?”

“Cemetery,” Lottie batted back, and snatched her arm away.

A flash of white between the tombstones blew away the retort he had coming. Early attenders of All Hallows’ Day had rendered the churchyard a field of candles, but this light matched none in the assortment – sterile and sharp as a torch.

Silhouetting against the flickering white, a baseball bat came down on one of the tombstones, followed by clinking. The person wielding it hurled it against the grass, several graves away. The trees soughed around them. Leaves smothered the lampposts by the church entrance.

Now Louis reinforced his grip on his sister and edged towards the wall. He tasted the earthiness of the moss as they crouched, the icy rocks a warning against his throat.

The person jammed the torch into the floral cluster at the tombstone's feet. Louis glimpsed stoic features and a crooked mouth before the person stalked towards the bat, retrieved it, and bashed it into the tombstone again.

Chips of granite hailed in the torchlight. The sweep of a hand stirred up petals and leaves and then the person turned around. The torchlight turned Niall's eyes into glass shards, popped holes in his complexion, painted him a wraith.

Louis kept a hand on Lottie's head where she ducked below the wall, invisible. Niall pivoted the bat once. They held each other's gaze over the dozen and dozen yards. The trees hissed, and Louis could do little but stare as Niall brushed off his hood and swung. The blow crackled through the night. The grave accepted.

That willowy back hid beneath a designer sweater and the merciless shadows obliterated whatever charm Niall naturally wore. The sweeps of bleached hair turned into extended strokes of light, and Niall swung, swung, swung.

Louis steered them home with a chaotic mind. And with an intense relief that Lottie hadn't seen anything.

 

✘

 

 **Harry:** _Are you seriously going to the woods?_

Diving from sight into his sheets, Louis caught a whiff. It was all washed textiles and the crisp edge autumn brought. No traces of home.

It was with faltering faith and a hack in his throat that he replied, _I don't share your grudge. Are YOU seriously not going?_

After a few rushed heartbeats and snapping of blinds in the Styles residence, Harry texted, _Don't get why you've curfew. What's the point of being locked up?_

Louis dragged himself out of bed. Aiding his blood-filled head with a palm to the temple, he listened to the heels and keys downstairs, the door swinging. The Honda buzzed off towards a pleasant evening out of town with the Maliks, which would be spent discussing safety precautions and the upcoming pumpkin contest. This was all Zayn had told him.

Another text.

 

 **Harry:** _Also, I'm coming as soon as the team lets me go. I'll probably go with Liam._

 

An outfit draped across his desk chair, parts of it only acceptable for a forest party, parts of it tailored for a rainy Sunday below three blankets with a bad soap opera. The parts didn't match.

From the assortment of perfumes Louis had chosen a reliable companion in _Terre D'Hermès_ , a scent his mother found appalling (her penchant was for softer nuances rather than the cedar and pink pepper – it came to mind that she would most likely approve of Niall's cologne) and a scent his sister wrinkled her nose at, but in approval. He had yet to see Harry's reaction.

Louis sagged in front of the mirror. Reassurances he had repeated in his sleep flooded his head, bleak compared to the reality. Stilling his mind would require a trivial detour. If explaining the reason, he was sure Zayn would agree to it. He just wasn't sure what consequences would come of what he had seen.

Once he had finished dressing, he laid out a pair of gloves by his boots.

Lottie toed into a pair of slippers and kicked them off in bed when Louis graced her doorway. Boxes labelled _bathroom_ and _man stuff (Louis)_ occupied her desk and adjacent corners of the room. She had taken all remaining ones with the purpose of building a cave. It became a cancelled project.

Disregarding the sign on her door reading _NO ENTRY – MALARIA INSIDE_ , he sidled into the room.

“Hey,” he said.

She made enough of a reaction to expose the silence in her headphones. When he steeled himself on her desk chair, she pushed them off.

“So, listen,” he said, hoping she would eventually look at him, “I've been a shit brother recently. And a shitty fucking person. I have been,” he insisted, and now she met his gaze. “There's no way you or mum are more disappointed in me than I am, so I just want to say how sorry I am for how things have been. And for what happened to you. And that I'll be here from now on.”

“Language,” Lottie said, voice small as her brother's could be.

“What?”

“You cussed.”

“Fucking—“ Louis grinned. Bowing his head, he slanted it up to find the hint of a smile on Lottie's face. “Whatever. You know, I'm here. Zayn and I are trying to figure out who to stop from terrorising Sunny.” Lottie kept staring. “You love hearing me cuss. I know it.”

“Fuck,” Lottie said.

“Watch it.”

Toying with the headphones, she shoved into her slippers. The chord coiled around her knees.

“So you're, like, FBI:ing everyone?”

Myriad posters of brain-munching zombies and modern knights in sleekly black with Glocks eyed them. A slice of authentic police tape strung over the bed. He remembered Lottie darting into an alley on their way home from school one day, snipping a piece of the crime scene. In times like this, Louis thought of how the city had somehow been better on them.

It overwhelmed him how much he loved her.

He shook his head, edging towards the bed. She allowed him to sit down.

He said, “No way as badass or progressive. But now that Niall is back, things might be looking up.”

Lottie curled below his arm.

“I miss Gemma,” she said.

Her voice wasn't small anymore, just faint. Louis saw flowers in her hair, grass stains on her knees. For a second he wondered which strategy she had used to escape the kidnappers. If the lessons at the library had been worth it. That she had even been able to remember any kinds of strategies in the heat of the moment. That she didn't end up in the statistics.

He glanced down at her, and he said, “Yeah. She was great.”

“Are you in love with Harry?”

Louis shook his head; no, he wasn't. “We're just... Just fooling around, you know?”

Lottie hummed. “I'm scared of him.”

“Has he hurt you?” Nothing, then a shake of her head. “Before... He didn't hurt me. It—“

“Mum told me.”

Louis scratched his neck, skin flaring. “Wow, sorted that out real quick.” He swallowed. “Anyway, he's a good guy. Bit of a misfit like us, huh?”

Lottie hummed once more, fingers curling into his hoodie. She stayed ducked into his side. The fairy lights above the window freckled her cheeks, suitable for her juvenile strawberry shampoo.

He patted her side. “Don't tell mum I've been out tonight, yeah?”

“Oh,” she said, a recollection. “Can I spend the night at Waliyha's? If you need an alibi, I'll just say you were too tired to go home after dropping me off and crashed at Zayn's.”

Louis didn't want to praise her for the deceit. It was a feature they shared that hadn't been passed down from their mother and thus wasn't something to be smug about. But he was, and he praised her anyway.

With a bag of necessities and stuffed animals packed – the latter had played a much bigger part in Lottie's life since the attempted abduction; Jay had given her a gift card and they had shopped it all up at Toys R Us, and Louis hadn't come – the two of them attempted one of the clapping games Lottie had been taught during recess. It was off-rhythm and off-rhyme and Lottie had always been bad at proper pacing. Louis lightly squatted her head a few times. Lottie wasn't gentle in her revenge.

“Hey,” he said, mid-clap. “I heard you baked a cake with Waliyha.”

“How?”

He narrowly rescued another disastrous hit. “Because we ate it at Liam's. It was really good.”

A bleakly bile green car of unknown maker breached the driveway. The clapping ceased.

“Goes with the house,” Lottie said.

Louis heaved her bag onto his back. His bicep hurt from the pounding.

When they slouched into the car smelling of blackcurrant pastilles and forgotten snacks, Zayn examined the siblings in the rear-view mirror.

“Change of plans?” he asked.

“Waliyha and she have reached an agreement. I'm the one with a curfew.”

Zayn began a calculation of the consequences. Deeming it futile, he abandoned it shortly after.

“All right,” he said.

They set course for the Malik property, the long way around town, past the woods. Longing stares fired to the spindly birches and rich firs.

Louis glimpsed stonewalls and moss.

“Swing by the cemetery, real quick,” he said.

The already quiet bass muted. An eyebrow quirked.

This would require an explanation and a possible intervention. He just hoped they could do this after they had dropped off Lottie.

Like the godsend he was, Zayn said nothing as he parked the car. The ambience was akin to the night of the incident, so Louis wasted no time in attempting a squint. He blessed the absence of rain, then trekked through the cemetery, alone.

His phone torched a path to the general area of the vandalism. Parts of him asked if the damage had been to Gemma's infant grave. Perhaps even Greg's. Parts of him noted to visit Greg's grave sometime, if it turned up unharmed. Parts of him asked if it truly had been Niall he had seen. All of him remembered the unmistakeable glint of boyish adrenaline.

It had been a fresh grave, or solemnly cared for, so he veered his search to the eastern quarters. He recalled following a black procession outside and Harry yanking his cross and Mr Styles holding his family together as the casket lowered into the ground. It had been on the other side of the cemetery. There had been more belongings – cardigans, a key in a broken lock, framed childhood photographs with rumpled edges beneath the glass.

Louis found the grave. The phone slipped from his damp palm, dangling from his fingertips. He turned back to the car.

“It wasn't anything,” he said, stealing a glance from Zayn in the rear-view mirror. He meant, _Round back here after we've dropped her off_.

With Lottie safely marathoning Spongebob on the other side of town, Louis guided Zayn between graves and pluming candles. Summer had been easier, less raw. This time, the tombstone was an easier find.

The night held its breath. The torch flickered on.

“It's chipped,” Zayn said. He sounded far less impressed than Louis had predicted.

Against his gut, Louis thumbed the indents in the granite. “It was an aluminium bat.”

Zayn shook his head. It wasn't at Louis' statement. “If Niall had wanted to destroy it, he would have. This was something else.”

 _NIALL JAMES HORAN_ , it began, and was followed by, _BELOVED SON_. There was no time of death.

Louis said, “They buried him? Metaphorically, or something?”

Thieving the torch from him, Zayn circled the hollow grave. White roses wilted below the etchings, smelling of dead grass and imminent decay and the mourning of an entire town, compressed to watery petals.

Zayn flashed the torch at Louis' throat to gauge his reaction, soon returning to his side. “Who would do that? Liam would've mentioned it at some point if he had known.”

“Doesn't matter, though. It doesn't.” In some places, the bat had done more than chip the stone. More impersonal quotes followed the initial one, cut clean of moss like its peers.

The realness of it daunted. Whichever Niall Harry was acquaintance with, whichever Niall Liam guarded and whichever Niall Zayn searched for, whichever Niall had sat with Louis on the roof, they all fit in the same shell. Since returning, Niall hadn't been able to sort out the shards, so now they merged and tore each other apart.

There was also this: if Safaa came back, would she suffer similar sensations?

They trudged back to the car. Zayn offered a pastille, which Louis accepted after some consideration. Frost crusted the windows. Zayn clutched the steering wheel but made no effort to kindle the ignition.

Louis chilled his palms against the dashboard. His forehead joined in. “Is he seeing a psychiatrist or family counsellor or something? To help him with the trauma?”

_Did he have any appointments after Greg?_

“I wouldn't know. He hasn't talked to me much,” Zayn said. “Wouldn't take them for the kind of people to openly discuss mental illnesses.” He suckled on the pastille. He crept out of the parking lot. “Niall saw something. Whether it's because of societal expectations or just repression, whatever. He doesn't want to share it. But he remembers something. Enough to do _this_.”

Disgracing his own grave. Cemeteries didn't cater to the dead. It didn't cater to people who had crossed over from grieved legend to physical marvel. It catered to those who remembered.

Somehow, Niall Horan was all these things at once.

“Does Greg's grave have a death date?” Louis asked.

Zayn tossed a glance to both pairs of gloves placed on the dashboard. “What are you thinking?”

“Was it an accident? Or did they never find his body?”

They left Sunny Hills behind, curving around the cradle of light only to come at it from a different angle. The world before them yielded to nothing but coughing headlights and gnats and tempting asphalt. Up ahead, the wood consumed everything. Louis had never explored this far.

Zayn shook his head, going for another pastille but tucking the pack away in second thought.

“He wasn't abducted. It wasn't as much a hit and run as it was his motorcycle failing at the wrong time. It was up by the railway. No one could tell who had been driving towards red. So yeah, it was an accident.”

The motorcycle. The red and greased and decadent and gloriously parked in the Horans' backyard, without maintenance. A memorial.

“It failed. You said so yourself.”

The car skidded across gravel onto pinecones and random tufts of grass and cigarette butts. Zayn killed the engine.

“Don't talk to Niall about Greg,” he said, and he had turned around in his seat. “Don't mention it to anyone. Don't think it. That good for you?”

“For tonight,” Louis agreed. They got out of the car, which glimmered of puke in the dull moonlight. “Then I want to examine that motorcycle.”

The smell hit them before anything else. Burning rubber, acrid firecrackers swarming shrubs and nestling into hair. Cars magically appeared in the clearing, open for business with leather seats and condoms and blankets and heating.

Niall enthroned one of the vehicles, below a banner tied to two impressive spruces.

_WELCOME BACK_

Fires raged in the background, a halo in his feathery hair.

Last decade's playhouses heaped in one of the bonfires. The only house that had escaped the flames stood aside and hosted the booze. The ethereal glow illuminated coloured glass bottles and chipped navy paint from the Volkswagen.

“From my friends at Mary's!” Niall answered when asked.

Often he received hollers in response.

Someone put cider in the hands of Zayn and Louis. The logo read _Mary's Corner_.

At the sight of them, Niall hopped from the Volkswagen's roof, stroking the busted hood on his stride forward. He hugged them both.

“You're early,” he said, as if the clearing wasn't on the verge of burning to the ground already. He appeared unruffled by the fact.

Zayn sloshed his cider. “Welcome back.”

Harry hovered from fire to fire, clinking his unopened drink with others. Louis drifted towards him. He slid a hand down Harry's arm, relishing the wiry muscles humming below. Harry dropped the conversation, lighting up.

Arms coiled around waists, noses in hair, bottles with dewy rims knocked to spines.

“New cologne?” Harry asked.

Louis' entire body twitched.

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.”

They kissed. Louis' bottom lip quivered in withdrawal. He tried seeing Harry in a critical light, thinking about the _what ifs_ and _maybes_ but all he could feel was the thump of his pulse everywhere their skin touched. He wondered if this was what had muddled Zayn. He wondered if it mattered.

“I like your rucksack,” Louis said and ducked into Harry's side. At least one of them had been successfully clever in bringing a jacket. Harry wasn't among that crowd.

Harry craned his head back for a glance.

“We should try renting one of those cars,” he said, “And I'll show you what's in it.”

A hitch in his voice told Louis the offer was of a more serious nature than required.

Louis said, “Borrow someone's coat or stand by the fire, otherwise we'll freeze to this spot.”

Slinging the rucksack onto his right arm, Harry fished out a hoodie to slip into. He drew Louis back in, mussed his hair, tucked a hand into the pocket of his jeans. The four-legged creature they became swayed over to the Volkswagen, a nest of moths, a court of royalty.

Breaking the neck of a ukulele, it joined the bits of sizzling playhouse and isolation in the bonfire. Someone brought forth a guitar. Logs rolled into an oval. Small items were passed around. The Volkswagen pierced the gathering, a knife's edge severing flesh.

Louis exhaled into his cupped hand when they sat, far away for Niall to become hinted rather than physically present in the shivering air. He couldn't bear this stench of rubber. Soon his palm filled with traces of blackcurrant, and he spotted Zayn across the fire, huddling with Liam and Doniya. Zayn knocked knees with Liam, both pairs of hands rubbing and nudging towards the heat.

No one noticed. Louis wasn't sure they themselves noticed, either, for when he followed their joint gaze it rested on Niall's perch on the car roof.

A tickle of sweetness from his right told him the items passed around were joints. Harry allowed him little suckles. Louis adored Sunny Hills, with its mysterious nooks and threads of adventure and temptation.

Silence rattled the clearing.

Niall spoke.

“Knowing that Liam's family have been such a rock for Sunny is a true relief,” he said. “When we were away... Mum worried so much. Seeing what I've seen this week, she didn't have to overthink anything. That's the greatest comfort of all.”

Up there, he was untouchable. Radiant, after all. It stirred hope in Louis, that maybe each of them could make it. Having unspeakable things done to you didn't have to make you quiet.

Niall certainly wasn't; he roared.

“Tonight,” he declared, with a grand sweep of his arm, languid, “We carry on. So drink and enjoy yourselves, because I will.”

Firecrackers sparked by the collection of beaten vehicles. Joyful shouts permeated the clearing, and when Niall raised his bottle, several others shot up in honour.

Louis wanted to be the object of Niall's stare, just for a second. He wanted to matter in all of this. Mattering to Niall was a privilege, an old addiction rekindling.

“I think it's time I leave Sunny for a while,” he overheard from the core group by the Volkswagen, and Niall emphasised the statement by knocking on the rusted steel he reclined on.

Someone protested, “You just came back.”

“It sounds like a sane decision,” Doniya cut in.

Liam said nothing.

Harry dragged him from the gathering, which had begun evaporating. In a flash Louis saw the baseball bat, the wickedly crooked features. Dovetailing aluminium and granite echoed in the wood.

On the other side of the logs, Zayn saluted him subtly. Louis just nodded.

The vehicular graveyard towered around them. Stands of miscellaneous sweatshirts and coats competed with tyre marks and boom boxes. More firecrackers, against metal, against sluggish feet. All toes involved remained intact. Louis came to wonder if they would bring out heavier explosives later in the night.

Harry mentioned something about Halloween Run at the sight of Liam by one of the clothing stands. Louis fingered the cross around his neck. It struck him as unsurprising to find it there, now that he touched the brilliant silver.

“I'm glad you're here,” he said.

“You're here,” Harry said, as if it made perfect sense. Then he added, “Hanging around the house isn't much fun anymore.”

Louis touched his exposed bruises, brief as to not draw attention to the action. A reminder of Mr Styles' control? Self-inflicted? Liam?

No, it couldn't be Liam. Somehow, admitting their friendship came harder to Louis than the admittance of Niall's safe return.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“Can I spend the night?”

Asking this, Harry seated himself in one of the skeletons, hand caressing the gnaw-dappled steering wheel. Louis couldn't see any rats.

“I still have curfew,” he said.

Harry gestured to the clearing.

Louis snorted. “I know. I know, it just seems dumb when I can't wake up with you.”

Immediately he cursed himself for the phrasing, the choice of words, realising he had said too much. The uttered truth made heat overflow inside him.

Harry just blinked. “I'm quiet.”

Louis let himself be tugged into the car. Up ahead, Niall joined the procession, whispering something that had Liam losing himself in the flames, before he brushed on with glimmering teeth. He stopped to shake Doniya's hand. She looked thoroughly unimpressed with the gesture.

Twisting in the driver's seat, Harry caressed Louis' cheek, edging knuckles down to his throat. A deceased Wunderbaum dangled between them, still shrouded in all lesser scents of the woods around them.

“Zayn and I are heading out after this,” Louis admitted. “It can't wait. But we can always sneak out, later. Eat out. Laze in the park. I'd love to. I'll have condoms in stock.”

Harry sighed, a surprisingly light sound for his dark face. “You're stunning. You smell incredible.”

They got out of the car. Louis, disregarding any parts of him damning this an 80s movie cliché, let his fingers dance across Harry's tattoos, no longer swollen. Harry brushed their hands together. It had become a familiar motion of comfort, of belonging, and Louis realised he should be the one giving Harry all this right now, offering his arms to hold and his ears to listen.

But Louis couldn't say this, so he stayed quiet.

“I'll go before anything explodes,” he said when Harry's hands felt up his sides.

Harry hummed, ducked in to kiss his neck. “I'll miss you.”

“I'll speak well about you to Zayn,” Louis said. “We'll go out sometime, to that restaurant you talked about.”

 

✘

 

Dead copses of apple trees flew by. Miles of road and fields. It had been a different story with Jay Tomlinson behind the wheel, before frost crusted the once fruitful soil.

As with most matters, Zayn handled the vehicle with care. Then again, they both knew he couldn't bring it back in scratches, and as it was now, ricocheting gravel drowned out the potential music. This time of night, only bad remixes of the Billboard Top 100 played on the radio. Zayn had demonstratively shut it off the moment they rolled into motion.

“Maybe Liam's sisters are there,” Louis said when they left the highway.

A terrible sideways glance came from Zayn. “Drop it.”

“No. Why would it make sense for Harry's family to be threatened into silence, but if it had been Niall, it would've been outrageous?”

“You don't know Niall.”

“Can you fucking _stop_ with that?”

“ _None of us_ know Niall. Not anymore. I'm not even sure we knew him before.”

The word shrouded the car in a bitter aftertaste. Before Louis had moved in. Before _they_ stripped children of their innocence. Before dusting Niall's radiance.

Midsummer Manor stood largely untouched. Plastic draped across most of the right wing, yet it seemed the most finished part of the building. The road to the basement had been paved and made inaccessible.

They parked near the embankment and trudged towards the property. Gloves were put on. Torches were lit. Boots scuffed over icy grass.

“Niall wants to leave town,” Louis said.

“So let him. How's that our problem, of all things?” They crossed over a hill. “We've established that it isn't Liam. I think leaving Sunny might be a sane thing to do after all this.”

Headlights flared opposite them in the rutted courtyard. Dust billowed in their wake. As the two of them ducked into the underbrush, car doors slammed and a procession of silhouettes marched to the mansion. Through the windows, Louis glimpsed plastic across furniture, tape strung across doorways, paint particles in the sterile light of construction lamps.

Then Louis looked to Zayn, whose torch was slipping from his hand. Louis rescued it and muffled the light. In his eyes, Louis saw defeat.

“Karen,” Zayn said, two meagre syllables. “That's Mrs Payne.”

The silhouettes manifested under the lampposts by the entrance, a handful of unknown faces and her. The doors opened, heels digging into stairs coated in gravel, the entrance lighting up only to illuminate more plastic.

Louis' palm sought Zayn's back.

“We should go,” he said. “There's no use in nearing, is there?”

Zayn shook his head, the back of his hand pressed to his mouth as if not to vomit.

“If we... It's them. If they see us everything we'll be— Everything will be screwed over.”

For a moment, Louis found himself hoping it had been Harry's mum here instead. That Liam was a saint and that Zayn wouldn't be crying in his parents' car, tearing off his gloves as if he had meant to grab his own skin. Louis picked up whatever belongings Zayn threw as they tore down the rock-mangled hills. His hope of inspecting the forbidden basement ebbed out easily enough.

Sans <the intermittent revving of engines or tyres over the courtyard, only the creak of ancient boughs on both sides of the water-filled gully threatened to choke Zayn's grunts. Handling both their torches as Zayn locked himself in the car, Louis turned them on. He sat down at the top of the embankment. Knees tucked, body hollow.

From inside the vehicle came severed screams. An occasional sway struck the car, which stayed loyally in place.

Some time later, the car door opened. Zayn joined him by the river. Louis handed over a torch. He didn't mention the ruddy cheeks or wet eyes. Zayn didn't mention the temperature of Louis' hands, barely mobile.

As they sat, Louis thought of how many gaps remained to fill. If anything, Liam had gone back to being a sidekick. A pawn. Niall was a pawn. But whereas Liam would remain in the frontier of the board, Niall savoured his privileges in the back. It didn't make sense for the duo to stay together if Liam's family had anything to do with the abduction. Niall would know if they did. He had to know.

Studying Zayn, Louis could tell they were on the same reluctant, impossible page. But for a while, time froze here, so they didn't move.

Louis flicked his torchlight over the water. Roots meandered down the other side, capricious in their nature. Below, treacherous earth exhaling pebbles. In the water, rocks. No, partly rocks, partly something limbed. Someone floating.

Louis shot up.

Zayn peered into the pool of light.

“That's a...” Louis couldn't finish the sentence.

Zayn offered, “That's a someone.”

 


	8. Lucky ones

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Halloween x

_AND NEVER IN MY WILDEST DREAMS HAS IT OCCURRED TO ME TO TRY TO GO TO SLEEP_

* * *

 

The body drifted. As it neared the shoreline, its size became cleared. It had a small nose jutting from the water and rags blooming across the surface like algae.

Its striking resemblance to the Horans' reappearance at the church had Louis shedding his clothes on his way down the embankment, losing footing and hoping Zayn would stay to illuminate his path. He jumped.

Numbing cold replaced his flesh. Every sense of _being_ disappeared below the surface. There had been a before and there would be an after, but those facts appeared impossible here. Louis forgot his quest to stay afloat until water seeped into his mouth, consumed his hearing, filled his nose with the musty odour of fen and fugitive fish.

Resurfacing, the stray rags tangled in his fingers. Vicious chains. Vines around his neck.

He jerked. The body bobbed closer, leisurely. Somehow it was too small for a human. The proportions were off. The sheer feel underneath his palm, of once living flesh decaying, gusted his certainty. Maybe whatever this was, it wasn't human.

But when he dove under the body, hoisting it on his back, he understood.

It was a child.

Zayn must have realised this at the same time, for the torchlight wheezed as he skidded down the embankment. Rocks barraged the water.

Louis fought to clear a path to the shore. The still water shifted, malicious overhead. It tugged him down. He released the body, kicking out in the river and letting the ripples carry it forward. Anxiety swarmed him at the thunderous sound. Surely they couldn't be heard from the mansion? Hadn't the courtyard been vast enough?

He regained power. Unable to grapple with his thoughts he surged forward. All that existed was his body propelling through the water, blood slow in his veins, skin bleak in the shattered moonlight.

Zayn gripped the child's wrist when Louis reached them. Heaving himself up, he swatted off mud on his trousers, their grimy hands hauling her up. Each time she skidded, their heels ploughed the earth, torqueing for footing.

Louis hit the grass. Briefly the night scorched him, then the cold sailed in and he convulsed in shivers. Rolling over on his side, he saw Zayn cradling her.

_Safaa. Safaa. Safaa._

Zayn just wept into her hair.

Headlights shot over the hill. Louis jolted but found the light veering around. Tyres bumped away from the mansion in the opposite direction of their hiding.

He allowed himself a mournful groan while falling to his back again. Supine, he realised he couldn't see any stars. He couldn't make out treetops from sky, or the filth on his hand from skin. Maybe he had died in that river. Maybe he had died.

He crawled. Zayn gazed towards him but remained clutching, a statue of depression.

“Zayn,” Louis started. “Have you felt her pulse?”

From the frozen panic set in Zayn's face, Louis could tell he hadn't.

“Feel her pulse!”

It took a moment, but then Zayn's fingers sought his sister's throat, rubbing in the dip where head met neck. Louis ignored the throbbing in his chest.

“It's there.” Awe permeated his voice. “It's there.”

Regretfully letting her go, he stripped of his jacket, wiring it around her.

Louis fumbled for his own clothes. He curled up in his tee, savouring the jacket against his prodding want for heat. Surely he would need it later.

Hands reached for him. Light fell from one of the open car doors when he stood up, the majority of his weight on Zayn. Small feet rested in the glow.

If Zayn had been able to speak, Louis wasn't sure he would have said anything at all. In the car, he handed Louis his jacket. They sat with the lights off. Beyond the stale algae, Louis tasted blackcurrant, a memory he wanted to savour. Cautiously he popped open the glove compartment and took a few pastilles. It rinsed the burning in his throat.

“Can you be stealthy?” he asked between clattering teeth. He recalled Zayn mentioning something about shock rather than sheer cold. He didn't know if it had been a thought of his own or actual words. Most intangible things blurred for him.

Zayn twisted in the driver's seat, one hand on Safaa's arm in the back, the other one firm on the steering wheel. With a metallic groan he guided the car from the embankment.

They drove.

By the time civilisation sparked far off in the horizon, the worst trembles had died down, so Louis chose to bet on his voice.

“You need to talk to me,” he said.

Zayn handed him a phone. “Can you call my parents?”

“And say?”

“That we're at the hospital. That they don't talk to anyone and just go straight there.”

“We can't risk anything,” Louis said in hopes of pinpointing a cause.

Zayn's eyes flitted between road signs, the white-streaked highway, the rear-view mirrors. He nodded, agreeing, “Exactly.”

Calling Mr and Mrs Malik went easier than whatever Louis had expected. It took little for Zayn to zone out, so for the majority of the conversation Louis dealt with the news without fear of correction. Fleeting elation filled Mrs Malik's voice, unlike the shrieks of sorrow he had heard her utter before. Had he ever heard her speak?

Then the phone was passed to Jay Tomlinson, and it all became distinctly more difficult.

“Mum,” Louis said, voice small.

Jay gushed on the other side, imbued with the news from overhearing the previous talk. Louis couldn't hear what she said.

“Mum,” he tried again. “Follow Zayn's parents. I'm sorry.”

_“Oh, love. There's another time and place for this. Just get home safe. It will be fine.”_

When he hung up, he cried.

 

✘

 

Immediate family. Those were the rules.

In the presence of his immediate family, Zayn regained the ability to form coherent sentences. In the reception with his immediate family, sans Lottie, Louis had stopped crying.

Towards morning, Louis and Zayn ended up in the anteroom at the same time, after passing each other in dwindling halls and sleeping on mediocrely rigid surfaces. Ibuprofens had been taken. Petals had fallen from flower assortments carried between rooms.

“Emaciated, bruised, no substantial internal damage...”

Louis let Zayn rattle it off. It had come in waves since getting on the highway. Rattling, a gradually steadying gaze, hand curling around Safaa's scrawny legs. Settling in the hospital, he had loaned his father's coat and handed it to Louis, drenching himself in hand sanitisers and crumbs from gowns.

Burrowed into the coat, Louis had accepted all cups of unknown beverages handed to him. From his mum. From Zayn.

On his fourth mug of whatever, the rattling broke off.

“Tell me about your clothes again,” Zayn said.

Louis popped up from hiding and tasted fresh hospital air, dazed. “Why?”

“Because your sister didn't take them. So who did?”

Sipping rich yet chilled coffee, Louis regarded him. Fewer sharp edges, more exhaustion, harrowing terror. It bubbled inside them both.

He tried forming a reply. Drank more coffee.

As if Louis had spoken, Zayn said, “But it wasn't only clothes.”

Louis nodded over the mug, encased it in his hands.

“What if they're watching? Intimidating?”

“It wouldn't be the first time,” Louis supplied. The coffee's mellow body of skim milk and fruit stilled his mind, which stirred from images of gloved hands jerking for Lottie. The monotone nuance of _hospital_ jarred somewhere in the back.

“I'm saying, what if someone... Liam's family, are covering more corners than we thought? His sisters could be _anywhere_ and your stuff is being stolen and we saw his parents at the mansion.”

“That they're...” Louis blinked at the floor. Nauseating pangs, of the same sort he had experienced on the earthy shore, thrummed in him. Seeping, everywhere. Unstoppable. Zayn coaxed the mug from his hands. “That they've been in my house. That they're just coming and going?”

“Is your sister home alone now?”

Louis nodded. “She sleeps with a knife by the bed. One of those blunt ones. Common cutlery.”

“No one knows about her yet. Safaa.” Zayn shrugged, folding leaves on a plastic pygmy palm tree. “They don't know that we've found her, so there's nothing _more_ to worry about. So don't tell anyone for a while.”

Louis nodded.

It had to be Liam. Too lazy. Too prideful.

On the way home, Louis went over it in the car, as much as he could. Two times he'd had the opportunity to dive under the cluster in Liam's room and find his missing belongings.

Within minutes, the dank river experience blitzed him and he flinched out of thought.

“I'll give it back,” he said, grounding himself in the unfamiliar scent of cigars and myrrh. It was a reach from Zayn, but the longer Louis spent in the coat the more he connected the two. He wanted to keep it.

Jay stayed silent.

Both squinted against the merciless dawn. She wore vaguely leopard-printed glasses. He wore caked eyelids miserably swiped with dry napkins.

“You know I can't prolong your curfew because of this,” she said. Sun glinted in her ringed fingers on the wheel, over the scratched alloy. “Suppose I shouldn't have made it that long in the first place. Maybe I've been harsh.”

Louis couldn't shake his head. If he moved, he would have to think, and thinking occurred as a plausible yet grievous task.

One of the ringed hands inched across his bared head.

Childishly, he wanted the motion to be everlasting. To be cradled, the way Zayn had held Safaa. He wanted to get out and puke in the ditch. He wanted Harry. He wanted to sleep in his own bed.

His mother said something about being accustomed to early mornings.

Louis said something about Midsummer Manor.

“What?”

He had to backtrack.

“We were at your project,” he said, breath tangling in the wool and polished brass buttons. “We found Safaa outside the mansion. So I went for a swim.”

“I'm staying there because leaving would jeopardise so much more than what's already going on. Something's already moving. I'm just doing my best to slow it down.”

“You're doing good.” His voice was small.

Rolling past rows and rows of sullen oak, Louis' fingers curled around the icy door handle. When they hit the driveway he burst out, coat left behind, Jay gawking. He didn't know the time but it must have been well into dawn, for Lottie munched cereal by an upside-down newspaper, fiddling with her phone.

He scanned the nooks in the kitchen for inconspicuous bumps and devices. Canned meals with metallic implants. Bugged chair legs. He found nothing.

By now Jay stood in the doorway, Mr Malik's coat wired around her neck like a mink. Bags of unknown origin dangled from both her arms. Purses. Groceries. Blueprints. Louis couldn't tell them apart.

“Do you want me to swap the sheets?” Jay asked. Her fingers danced along the plastic straps. Her rings didn't shimmer anymore.

Louis lifted a finger to his sister, lowering it at the sight of Lottie’s aghast stance. “I know you didn't take my stuff. It's fine. It's fine.”

Lottie made a gesture to their mother. Jay shrugged half-heartedly in return.

“But you have to tell me,” Louis said and stilled his errant gaze, “If anything of _yours_ is missing. Even if it just ends up under your bed or something. I have to know.”

Jay edged, “Louis? Do you want a fresh duvet?”

Lottie made work of not splashing milk across the table when releasing her spoon. She beckoned him upstairs. Louis had never thought his sister to be the kind of person who _beckoned_ anyone, let alone him. Now it appeared as naturally part of her as the pink tips of her hair.

“Air fresheners?” Jay called from downstairs.

For minutes, Louis slouched on the bed while Lottie picked through her room.

“I'll tell mum to bring whatever bed stuff she planned on giving to you, to me,” she said with a bowed eyebrow.

Louis felt the duvet. Damp.

“We went skinny-dipping,” he said, and it was worth it to see the flicker of incredulous amusement in her eyes.

The room struck him as irrationally orderly. Posters askew on walls and closet or otherwise stacked in drawers or tucked into boxes. Minimal amounts of sock-adorned lamps.

Lottie said, “You're missing.”

“You need to clarify.”

“You're _missing_ ,” she said. Then she showed him the old dollhouse. Mama Jay in the kitchen cutting miniscule pumpkins out of a peach kernel. Daughter Lottie lazing on the roof, a makeshift firework of garish strings in hand.

No Louis.

“Maybe I'm in the box,” he suggested.

He wasn't. Lottie emptied it on the floor for emphasis.

He texted Zayn, _They're watching me. I need help_.

Jay caught up with her children. Bedding swelled in her arms. Lottie nicked it before their eyes and nudged Louis off the bed. Soon, Jay offered a dazed smile, light on lips and eyes.

She asked Louis, “Do you want breakfast before or after you've slept?”

 

✘

 

The leaking faucet didn't remind Louis of the passing time. It was only another gateway into the void. One of the repetitive notions Louis sought to still time, not fast-forward.

As one of the house's plethora of neat imperfections – imperfections which would drive Jay up the walls that winter – it served its purpose more than well, since it allowed him to stay in the house.

Louis thought of this wedged between the toilet and the bathtub. As it occasionally spattered across his hand in the sink, he took comfort in the heat of the water.

Jay had installed an air freshener atop the cabinet some weeks prior, which spurred scents of a distant shore. The brine no longer hammering against steep cliffs, but serene, and the foreign mark of cedar stark in the floral melange, so distinctly different from the iron grip depth of late October, despite being of the same calibre.

Above all other imperfections, Louis preferred the bathroom.

Unfurling from his crooked state, he gauged the weathervane on Harry's roof, wavering between North and East. Below, still blinds covered the windows. Louis rested a hand on the chilly wood, waiting. Then he crept back to his nook.

Someone knocked on the door. He didn't open.

He longed for concrete. For voices he didn't know speaking about subjects he didn't care about. For the notion that there was more beyond his block and that, if he had the time, could venture out there. For the sort of borderline hostile environment his mum admonished but he knew how to handle.

He couldn't handle this.

This time, the knocking didn't relent.

When he spoke, it was a rasp. He swallowed and tried again, pulling himself up on the toilet lid.

“We're having dinner in fifteen,” Jay said, voice close. “I'm taking Lottie to school tomorrow, so you can sleep in.”

Her shadow shifted below the door. He stared at it, his knuckles whitening over his kneecaps.

After a moment, Jay said, “But you have to eat something. That's all you have to do.”

When she moved down the hallway, he scrambled up and leaned out of the doorway. A hamper bounced on her hip, but she turned around for him.

“Why are you taking her?” he asked.

“You had— There was an exam this week, so your schedule got moved around some so you could stay home tomorrow.”

He still didn't understand.

“Niall told me he had arranged it so you could have a day off,” Jay said. With a small shrug, she left down the stairs.

Louis remained in the doorway. Instead of shutting the door, he retreated to his room.

Although the notebook hadn't been found, he had the board of clues and suspects up. Lacking in red thread, he had connected the profiles with strips of coloured paper. From Niall's missing-poster, one route led to the police. One led to Harry. One led to Liam. One led to Safaa. All sections but Harry's were cluttered.

Louis peered out between the curtains. The heavy evening forbade a clear view, but he could have sworn he saw a flicker of blinds. Lingering, he found it to be a mirage.

He stared at the board. Cursed. Wished for his notebook.

It wasn't the entire story. He needed to know what happened in the cemetery, and why Niall went out of his way to ensure that Louis got an extra day off. They hadn't spoken privately since the return. Despite the insistent worry that he _didn't_ know Niall, that they _weren't_ mates, he opted for the reason that Niall cared for him. He couldn't trust Zayn to identify the nature of their friendship.

That left the cemetery. Chips of granite sparking in the black.

Liam and his family had to fit in somehow. There had to be a significant amount of signs Louis hadn't caught up with.

“Couldn't it...” He swallowed and trailed a finger from Liam's cluster to Niall. “Maybe that's the catch. Just _knowing_.”

He drafted a text for Zayn.

_Niall's keeping Liam on a leash because he knows. They both know. I don't know why Niall doesn't expose them but surely that's it? That he CAN expose them at any time?_

Louis sat on the bed, leaving it unsent. Jay shouted about dinner.

What were they doing, pretending they knew anything?

 

✘

 

One day turned into a week of Louis staring at the board and texting Zayn. His curfew passed. He missed it – having an excuse for not getting out of bed, which had become less of a _bed_ since he dragged the mattress across the hall to Lottie's room late Tuesday. When Zayn finally replied it was about Saturday, about him being unwilling to leave the hospital, about Louis keeping an eye out.

Rumour had it that Harry's costume was a marvel of creativity and exceptional craftsmanship. Rumours which of Harry was the sole source.

Yet upon arriving at the forest trail, Louis assessed whichever costumes had been exposed for the mere mortals, such as Louis himself, and they fed the truth of Harry's rumours. Torn leather wings bursting from team overalls; faux mice impaled on fangs; contact lenses beacons along the gloomy track.

Aside from a bruise below Harry's ear, only a pair of knitted mittens contributed to his current state. The lantern-fused evening erased him in the cluster of fellow team members and volunteering teachers. Louis had given up guessing his costume after countless evenings spent being teased in the library, on the way home, behind blinds. Until Harry had asked him to wear something red.

He looked healthy. He looked _more_ than Louis had seen him in quite a while.

As one of Sunny Hills' annual concoctions, the run garnered a lot of attention across adjacent towns and stimulated local press. However, unlike previous years, tomorrow's paper wouldn't boast an article signed _Zayn Malik_.

Despite the vow of frequent updates, Louis' phone had been silent for hours. He hoped Zayn finally caught some sleep.

Mr Horan had come to the start while daylight still clung to the moss and lucid _HALLOWEEN RUN_ banners, photographing and taking notes. His son had assisted the football team in weaving props around gnarled boughs lit by two dollar spotlights in the moss.

Here in the woods, Niall floated in the outskirts one second. In the next, he inspected Liam's white-dappled face and tentacles blatantly tucked under a winter jacket. Then he purposefully walked towards Louis, who was stagnantly jogging and batting the solid breaths billowing from his mouth.

Louis' jog slowed, taking little comfort in the pumpkin his mother had contributed, on a rock behind him; it hadn't won the competition and so she wanted it out of the house.

Had Niall done his round in the crowd and now made up for missing Louis on the first lap? Alone, and Louis smothered the hope in his chest, but why now, weeks of lost opportunities later? All Louis had wanted was to talk. He had taken recovery into consideration, always looked twice when Niall moved behind the curtains or glanced past Louis in school, but he had chosen one-on-one time with everyone but Louis. With him, Niall had chosen silence.

This time they didn't hug. Niall reached him and said nothing, twisting to the mass of joggers on the track. Louis waited to be left. To glimpse the Niall Harry said he knew, the Niall Zayn had mentioned but not described.

But Niall only stood. Perhaps this was him reaching out.

_Why haven't you talked to me?_

_How do you know Harry?_

_What actually happened in the cemetery?_

“So,” he said, “Are you really leaving?”

Niall drank and fastened the water bottle in a snug belt. He didn't wear a team overall, and all at once Louis felt foolish for having assumed him to be team captain. Although, he had mentioned another sport at one time, hadn't he? Golf? Lacrosse?

Niall nodded, once.

“Zayn and I are looking for the perpetrators, and we've done a lot of progress. They're not far away.”

“Yes. Zayn told me.”

Charcoal streaks breached his face, a grinning maw above his still mouth, similar to the childish masks Lottie attempted each year. Delicate grey hollowed his cheeks, dusted his hair. Louis felt naked in his presence.

Facing him, Niall continued, “He usually multitasks the part of running and filming. It's really wicked to watch— The footage always makes people laugh, but he's not much of a screamer.”

He yielded nothing, yet an insignificant part of Louis kept searching for a reaction. Years of being in the public eye, of serving the town, Louis supposed, steeled him. Features of muffled disquiet prickled his stance. Louis only recognised this now, after drowning in his own anxiety for a week, with thoughts looping, slack habits forming.

“I never thanked you for covering up at school,” he said the moment he realised it. “I didn't realise you knew.”

“Did it help?”

Louis threw a glance to the assembling joggers. The volunteering teachers and the football team vanished along the track, but he wouldn't be able to take a step with this heart rate.

He said, “Maybe I should have stayed home today, but...”

Touching Louis' back, Niall walked them towards the start. Bald beeches clawed for their sneakers. Vile ghost adornments shrieked somewhere in front of them, promises of unspeakable torture. Louis comforted himself with scarce inhales of jasmine-tinged cologne.

“Sometimes it's easy to forget that we're supposed to be kids,” Niall said. “It's awful that anyone can be stripped of that.”

Louis wasn't sure who the words were aimed at.

Heels scraped over pine cones. Delicate globules of sweat sparkled on lips.

They parted by the joggers. Regaining his own footing, he allowed Niall to duck into him.

“Happy run.”

The hearty streetlights blackened. Sterile light swooped from overhead, attached to feathered beasts. Joyful screeches erupted as the cluster spread around Louis, consuming the woods.

The nightmare kicked his pulse further into gear, hammering in his lungs. He sought Niall in the crowd while they moved. The ground flashed in specks of lightning and dismembered hands. One of the participating teachers blew past him with discarded glasses and bristling hair, dogged by an overgrown child in torn clothing.

He calculated how long the track had been when he had investiagted it, weeks earlier. He felt the prickle of pine needles and bleeding through his socks. He felt a distant sun scorching his tanned shoulders.

A scream launched him back to the present. He swallowed the thought.

One of the football players had emerged from the nothingness. His monumental horns blazed a trail towards a young woman in stomps and shrieks and smothering clutches.

Louis recalled concerns from the public about the run. _Given recent events_.

He remembered the mud-slick embankment, a ghost of the dirt now bespattering his bare ankles.

Someone bumped him off track. Another someone soon swooped him from the dead shrubs, all claws and smeared cosmetics on his wrist. A mechanical wraith surged towards him.

He bolted from all sound and dodged movement ahead and on his flanks and the monsters reaping joggers by the second. He sprinted from his failing lungs and from Liam to satanic howls behind him and something burst by his eye—

Louis fell down in tawny ferns, ablaze by a lantern netted in glittering spider web. Bark splintered his fingertips as the force kept yanking him and he held the tree trunk with all his might, knowing he would cease to exist if he let go. Gasping for breath, drowning, the pebbled earth crumbling.

His water bottle smashed against his thigh and disappeared into the underbrush as a hard maw hovered his neck. No breath teased the hairs in his neck. Not the slightest tremor. From below the mask, a voice spoke.

“I love you in red.”

For a moment longer, Louis fought with his reeling mind. Then he abandoned the bark to hold Harry.

The mask came off. Louis stared at the flopped rubber and non-eyes and flat fangs. The wolf was tucked away and a palm ran across his sweat-streaked spine.

“Are you hurt?” Harry asked. “Are you having a... an anxiety attack, or anything?”

Louis leaned back to regard him. Harry's breath was sweetly stale.

“My cardio is way off. I'm more a weight-lifting type of bloke,” Louis said.

As he sank to the ground he brought Harry with him. Soon they sat among roots and jackets and Harry's mysterious rucksack.

He touched Harry's face. “I missed you so much this week. I'm sorry I didn't...” Harry watched him. Undemanding. Open. Louis knotted his hands away from him. “I'm sorry. Do you have an extra jacket?”

Harry pulled one from somewhere in the ferns. The rucksack stayed untouched. He guided Louis' trembling hands through the sleeves, then handed him the lost water bottle.

Louis cupped it like hot chocolate. “Has Niall passed us?”

Harry shrugged.

“If you'd fainted I'd have run with you in my arms,” he said.

Spying on the track, Louis soon found the crowd diminishing. If they took the short-cut up ahead that would remove a mile from the run. He could be away from this, home.

Louis laid his head on the trunk. “I've really missed you.”

“Maybe I can spend the night?”

Louis dared a smile. “Maybe you can.”

He'd never fallen asleep with anyone. The thought of not being alone conjured sentiments of firmness and being grounded. Maybe he could do this with Harry there.

He asked, “Do you feel safe with me?”

Harry kissed him.

As Louis clutched the wolf mask, a bloodcurdling screech tore them apart. Some of the jocks emerged in uncertainty and followed it with glances and shrugs and quickening steps. Costume parts shed across the track.

Louis' breathing worsened.

Motions coalesced before his eyes – Harry said something serious about carrying him and Louis declined by touching his bruised neck. They got on the track as sterile light hacked into darkness overhead and the backs of football players edged away. Harry held his shoulder when they advanced. The rucksack held the morbid Halloween devices Harry had hid with.

One of the electric wraiths dove onto them around the next bend. The nearest teacher jammed buttons at its base and skullcap and finally snapped a chord. Its ashen rags shielded a deranged bone structure.

Louis thumbed the popping veins on his wrist. He followed Harry's demonstrated breathing pattern, deliberate and interrupted by squeezes to his shoulder, and that's when he noticed the cluster.

They stood everywhere. Some half their length in off-track shrubs, others atop rocks. The screams had silenced when they proceeded, gawking at the mannequin strung up in a tree.

Petals, foreign to the run, fluttered from the body in vast drapery. The dress exposed errant make-up and a lilac-tinted wig, with arms twisted to clutch the snare. Paint slashed across Gemma's abdomen.

 

**_MURDER_ **

 

Torches danced over the text from the audience. Coach Flowers heaved himself up the sturdier boughs and requested any kind of tool. With it he snapped the wire.

Harry had dropped Louis' shoulder.

The circle expanded when the mannequin plummeted into its midst. The dyed wig caught in unknotted shoelaces and splayed over the trampled earth. Gemma hadn't said much in Louis' vicinity, and for a second in the silence he doubted if it was just a mannequin.

It was her dress. Not a replica. It couldn't be anything else.

He took Harry's wrist and received a questioning whimper.

Coach Flowers touched ground. Bystanding teachers scuttled to shield the body.

“I'm sure we are all very familiar with the hesitation at proceeding with the run this year,” he said. Switching off his headlamp, several joggers lowered the hands over their eyes. Many of them appeared wanting to lift them again at his expression. “And I'm sure all my boys can confirm that this doll wasn't here half an hour ago when we set up the track. So who's seen anything?”

Fingers prodded Louis' side. He caught Harry blanching and reaching for his pocket, sealed by their bodies pressing together. Louis stepped back, watched a lighter surface, then pushed down Harry's hand again.

But the prodding wasn't aimed for a smoke. Harry's hand kept twitching.

Through the chill, his skin sparked under Louis' palm. Louis withdrew, stared at him, felt the fluttering hand at his side.

Refraining from chucking off his jacket, Louis crept out of it and gauged Harry's expression as it draped across his unmoving frame.

“I know you kids,” Coach Flowers said, arms knotted and shoulders shot back; somehow he had a glow of certainty, even now, “But I'm tired and it's getting late for bullshit. We know some of you have seen it and we know you can't leave until it's sorted.”

When Harry winced at his touch, Louis stepped back.

“It's not her. It's not,” he said, shifting to shield them from the crowd and keeping his words for the two of them. He didn't reach out. Harry shook less. Gnats frolicked on their once sweaty skin.

Louis said, “You're safe,” and found Liam in the lump, bearing an unreadable expression. By his side was a gaunt kid quietly blathering in his ear. Frozen, Liam offered little in verbal reply. He looked at something far beyond the mannequin.

Louis exhaled in relief as he realised Zayn hadn't seen this.

The circle shivered once more while the mannequin drifted off with the teachers. Coach Flowers soon lit his headlamp, so no one saw where it ended up. There one moment, night in the next.

“And I was afraid I wouldn't have to deal with these sandbox manners anymore. Boys, you're cleaning this up. So everyone just go into pairs and Moss—“

The gaunt kid jerked his chin up, freckled with mud or cosmetics or blood.

“I don't want to see anyone out there alone, all right? Two and two, three and three, don't care. Stick together.”

While the team scattered, Louis took the chance of speaking up.

“Flowers...” Even the surname came out with restraint. Too formal, somehow. He was glad he hadn't settled with _Sir_.

The coach leniently looked at them both.

Harry no longer resisted, so Louis brushed his wrist. A wild pulse beat below.

“Can Harry go?” he asked.

Coach Flowers nodded towards the way they'd come. “Naturally.”

“I can escort him.”

Branches sprouted from Niall's bleached hair. In the beam of the head lamp, the paint no longer hollowed his cheeks; it devoured them.

He neared Harry with a scraped-up palm, set in a soothing bow.

Harry's eyes harrowed his. “I'll have to decline.”

Niall held his gaze for a beat longer. Then he hauled up the chord that had strung up the mannequin. He dumped it on Liam and headed into the woods.

Harry tore himself from the scene; Louis followed.

The track displayed traces of sneakers punctuating chaotic terror in the mud. An entire shoe poked from the shrubs shallowly illuminated by the sterile lights, which switched back to their usual tawny tint as they crossed onto asphalt.

Touching his face, Louis wiped away an unlucky ant. It bled over his thumb.

The two of them walked on separate sides of the narrow road. Soon, Harry joined him, and Louis took his hand. He felt a moderate pulse, skin cooling or heating to an inconspicuous temperature.

Harry held him like he always had. Louis pondered how to talk to him.

“So, is the Chief's son on the team?”

Pinecones hopped at Harry's kicking feet. “Who is?”

“Some kid called Moss. Are they related?”

Harry snorted, then offered a nod. “He got so _wasted_ at mine. He's a lad.”

“Your party was better than Niall's,” Louis said, gauging his reaction.

Harry just smiled – soft, content.

“It was, wasn't it?”

Dead grass swayed under the streetlights of their lane. Louis had no plans of sneaking Harry in, so they stepped from the steadily dampening night into the crisp hallway. He helped Harry out of his outerwear and thumbed away the more morbid aspects of his make-up.

Whilst Jay tried catching Louis' eye in the kitchen, he urged Harry up the stairs in silence. The telly broadcasted a foreign film and nothing but a purse occupied the kitchen chairs, so Lottie was asleep.

“He's staying the night,” Louis said once Harry had disappeared.

Arms crossed, Jay rubbed her neck. One of her nails had snapped. Chips of teal paint dappled across her clavicles.

“Tonight?” she asked. “Is this an _adult_ situation?”

“It's a Gemma situation. You can... You can ask Niall's parents about it. They'll know.”

She lowered her hand. “We'll talk in the morning, yeah?”

He nodded.

Cluttered in expired homework and napkins, the staircase had never been longer. He halted halfway up.

“Mum?” And she hadn't moved from the doorway, so she looked up, biting an undamaged nail. “How did your date go?”

“ _That_ date?” After a second's thought, she waved him down and swept into the living room. He stood by as she lit scented candles. Chucking on some puffy slippers, she burrowed down in the armchair. “She was nice.”

“Nice? Mum, I'm fine with it. If you're—“ He took a deep breath filled with caramel candles. “I don't want you to feel like you have to think about me, or us, when you're out. We'll be fine.”

She smiled. Nodded. “I know.”

He knew she needed to hear it. He knew he needed to say it.

He nodded.

Upstairs, his mattress lay in the hallway. The warning of malaria inside hung on Lottie’s closed door. From within came a monotone thumping, which either suggested that his sister hurled tennis balls at the zombie hunters in her posters, or jammed her feet above the bed in rhythm with the latest hits.

Louis took the mattress and dragged it into his bedroom.

Harry sat placid on the naked bed, hands clasped and slouching while he took in the surroundings. It had cleaned up since his last visit, downscaled. Bits of info missed from the board of suspects.

In the wake of air fresheners and anxious cleaning, it smelled less of _home_ than it had with Louis in the room. The fabricated scents of baked bread or mountain lodge in its murkily crisp comfort didn’t sit well with the room’s original odour.

Right now, Harry didn’t seem to mind. Maybe, in his room, beneath the tones of beaten cleats and cannabis, it carried the same scent.

Louis closed the door, leaned back on it. Refraining from thrumming his fingers against the wood, he let them play at his elbows. Blood dawned in tiny rips where bark had married flesh. His skin felt gravelly.

Pointing at the bedframe, he said, “I’ve been sleeping in Lottie’s room.” When Harry didn’t demand an explanation, he added, “You can shower, if you want. Do you want something to eat?”

Harry left the board of suspects, one of his feet pushing at an abused newspaper print-out of the abductions. He gave the impression of being one with the ruffled environment in a way Louis couldn’t be. Hair pushed back with chilled sweat and wax, he bordered on being another piece of the surrounding chaos, but regarding him stirred a profound calm in Louis.

Harry looked at Louis and shook his head. He got up and dragged the mattress back in place, all hairs and dust colonies and squashed insects. A hit swept most of it off.

The explosions of acne had ebbed away in the cold, just as Harry’s tattoos had softened. Slanting his head up to watch Louis near him, the light caught on the crevices of his face where Louis’ fingers wandered.

Louis treated himself to a smile when he realised Harry’s skin had the same gravelly feel.

While resting his forearms on the bedframe, Harry said, “I wish I’d known you this summer.”

Louis sat over him, knees touching flanks, eyes solemnly challenging. Harry had a worker’s hands. Weathered by labour, with mountains of veins and knobby knuckles littered in scratched. He tried imagining Harry in a garden, tending petunias and slaughtering weeds. The thought beckoned another wave of calm.

He remembered those hands on him.

Louis didn’t realise he was ogling until Harry averted his gaze.

He moved his hand to the tattoo on Harry’s bicep where it sat proud in its existence.

“Did you get these this summer?” Louis asked.

“First chance I got. My birthday’s in February but it took a while.”

“Mine’s in two months. I’m not sure how to celebrate.”

Louis touched each pattern in reverence, leaning closer to discern a cluster. Harry’s mouth caught his.

In the kiss, Louis tasted the brownie they had shared from Mary’s Corner; the dirt on their elbows; Harry’s gritty palm bowing over his neck. By nature, Harry preferred silence over noise. But kissing came without restraint, in bursts of arching his back and unhinged gasps and not quite lidded eyes molten to incoherence.

Louis’ smile broke them apart.

Harry’s voice came a moment too late to be casual, foggy with inexperience. “What?”

Louis shook his head and held Harry’s face in his hands, fingers sweeping across mud caked in his scalp. The flesh of Harry’s bottom lip trembled against his teeth.

“Don’t matter if you’re out this time,” Harry said while Louis was busy with the tingling in his head. As a matter of explaining, he slipped out from Louis’ grasp and delved into the rucksack. A couple of various low-budget condoms landed on the bed.

As a certain muted glee settled with Louis, eying the brands and baffling textures, Harry sat by his side.

“You know I’m loud. I want to be loud. I wouldn’t want to...”

Harry sought his gaze where Louis gleaned cramped statistics of successfully prevented pregnancies on the packs. Each one had absurd titles, or textures like _speed bump_ and _groove_. Someone had inked the plain grey back of a pack with _Don’t kid yourself!_ in a scrawl that disturbingly matched Liam’s.

Against his knee, Harry’s palm rested with its valleys and secrets, a map of desire. But it strayed, at times remaining only with fingertips to bone. Restless. Searching.

Harry spoke against Louis’ throat. “I want you.”

The parted windows wryly displayed their silhouettes. No robotic wraiths surged outside. No dead sisters knocked against the massive oak tree.

If Louis reached his hand out, he could touch the windowsill. It would be icy. He didn’t want to move. He just wanted to watch Harry touch him in the glass.

“Do you feel safe here?” Louis asked.

“With you,” Harry agreed.

Slumping, Louis closed his eyes, listening for Lottie’s thumping, or Jay dogging fugitive ants between kitchen cabinets. He couldn’t hear them. Therefore, they could most certainly hear him.

He looked at Harry’s wiry muscles and the glimmer of saliva at the corner of his mouth and thought about how much he wanted to fuck him. He thought about how he couldn’t give to that want. He thought of how inconvenient they were. He thought about Harry going home with him. He thought about how much it meant to keep Harry safe.

So he said, “On the other hand…”

Nudging aside an unused football, he got to his knees.

Harry scooted up the bed. His chest peaked in the steadily chilling air. Louis appraised the interest in his shorts.

Most of the condoms had fallen hostage to Harry’s clenched fist. Louis somehow caught a pack that didn’t boast Liam’s signature. Harry stopped him.

“Can you do it without?” he asked.

The night coated Louis in an instant. He shook his head.

Moths soared overhead, wheeling onto noses and hipbones, but neither of the boys got up to kill the lights.

Louis breathed him in.

The residual tension untwined from Harry’s stance. He fell to his forearms, jerking closer to the edge of the bed the moment Louis looked up. A certain longing filled his voice. The kind he’d had speaking about football when they first met. The kind he usually smothered.

And oh, what a sound that was.

It tasted less bitter than Louis remembered. Sweat the night hadn’t yet pacified trickled at the edge of fabric and plastic, scented with salt and pine and the wetted rasp of rubber against his tongue and the weight pooling there.

He edged its rim up. Red patterns extended around Harry’s thighs from unfitted football gear. Louis soothed it, venturing across previously sheathed flesh and Harry’s hands rearranged in the sheets above, quietly, and—

 _There_ , the bitterness.

The already erratic breaths overhead sharpened when Louis rolled off the condom.

He wondered why Harry made him this reckless.

Harry kept his focus in the ceiling. Tendons popped from his knuckles. Veins protruded his craned neck.

“Can you use your hands?”

Harry started. “My hands?”

Lifting his gaze, Louis suckled on the tip of his thumb.

“In my hair,” he said.                                     

Harry struggled for a while. He kept his thumb in Louis’ mouth, flitting saliva across his cheek, weighing on his bottom lip. Once Harry started fumbling, he grounded his fingers down as if it would steady his voice. “Oh God.”

Chills sparked over Louis’ spine.

It started to rain.

They showered separately. They used the same toothpaste. Louis made an effort to clean his room, raw-limbed and anxiously content.

Harry came into bed after a long while. He was still damp behind his ears. The dirt had been swept from his jaw. He was dolefully handsome.

Louis touched his cheek and said, “I want you to be safe.”

Harry fully tucked the duvet over them and said, “I’m keeping you safe.”

The few moths had nested far above them. Their wings fluttered as of a shiver from time to time, and Louis turned to face Harry. While Louis touched him, Harry made an effort not to withdraw, a feat that shone through in a little too rough clutches and the uncertain curve of his mouth. Harry drew Louis to his chest.

“Do you know who planted the mannequin?” Louis asked.

Fingers kept moving in his hair. Calloused hands idly worked at a scab on his spine. Below him, Harry had stilled.

“Yes. Shouldn’t we shut the blinds?”

“Harry…” Louis imagined the weight of the Liam-autographed condoms and nudged them off the bed. “He won’t do anything to you. She wasn’t… It’s not your burden to bear. You’re a good brother.”

Harry smelled his hair.

“Safaa is back,” Louis said. His voice was small. “Maybe they’ll come back, those who’ve been taken. This could be a sign. And it’ll stop. Zayn will know what to do. But they won’t— I know Gemma can’t… But no one else has to go through what you have– still are.”

Louis’ mind revved. He needed to look in his journal, needed to remember. Didn’t that mean their parents would have known about the Paynes? If Harry wasn’t allowed to—

Louis needed to ask Harry questions he shouldn’t need to hear. But Louis couldn’t break their sphere, here. Their mutual lifelines. There were things he needed to do that he couldn’t.

“What?”

Louis gazed up at him. “Lottie loved her. And I know how much I love my sister. So we’ll fix this and we can just live. It’ll be over. Her murder is—“

“What?” Harry’s eyes had glazed over. He twisted to the ceiling. Streetlights vaguely lit his harrowed features. “She wasn’t killed.”

“You should be allowed to talk about her without worrying about your dad!”

“I couldn’t give less of a shit what dad thinks.”

Despite trembling, inching over to the other side of the bed, Harry put his arms around Louis once more. His breath wavered, minty and severe.

“Harry.” Saying it soothed the ache in Louis’ jaw. Saying it mollified wars. “I’m sorry I’m such a twat. You matter so much to me. You take such good care of me and I just— I’m going to stop this. I want to do it.”

Harry nudged Louis’ head into his neck, brushing his spine. His voice was no longer uncertain when he spoke, but rather cautious.

“Maybe you can just let it go,” he said.

“They tried to take Lottie. She needs to live in safety. She needs to not sleep with a knife by her bed, and have her own room and not have her brother hogging the floor. They’re bribing my _mum_. I don’t want anyone to live like this.”

Harry scowled. “You _are_ safe.”

Louis shook his head. “I’m going to bring Gemma justice, okay? You know they won’t stop. You have to know they won’t stop.”

The moths burst off the ceiling, circling the fogged window. Their shadows haunted the opposite wall.

Harry examined them.

“She did it to herself. Mum was so ashamed – didn’t want to acknowledge it at first. We were a ‘good family’.” He quieted, considered. Louis heard them breathing. “Gemma was easy to love. They can’t just— She shouldn’t be stuffed away.”

Louis’ cheek rubbed up against Harry’s damp chest. Harry was so still, somehow, this far from peace. Louis held him.

“You couldn’t tell me,” Louis said.

The humidity turned into less of an illusion and more of physical evidence. Brittle wings caressing foreheads. Gashed lungs rattling breaths to cut yourself on.

The mattress smelled of Lottie’ obnoxious perfume, had indents of night-time toilet visits when forgetting he slept at the foot of her bed.

Each time Louis peered up, or Harry rearranged his grip, they dipped into the hollows.

Harry’s voice had steadied when he said, “Maybe this just isn’t a mystery you can solve.”

Louis stroked his creaseless forehead, then rejected the insect at the roots of his hair. It ran through his fingers. Once streaked with pine needles; now drooping, bleak. Chilled by the air.

Something had made a hack in the line of his eyebrow. Louis smoothed it out.

Harry looked at him. “I’m not ashamed of her.”

Something more hung off Harry’s lips, lightly parted. But he didn’t say anything else.

The dampened pillow did little to lull them to sleep. They looked at each other a lot, until the night was less grating, until it became elastic to accommodate them. Harry was hot against him.

Louis remembered the summer.

 

✘

 

Harry left his rucksack.

Once Louis had adjusted to the feeling of being awake and alone, he toed past Lottie’s closed door and downstairs. Morning tea in her cupped hands, Jay surveyed him through feisty bangs.

“When did Harry leave?”

Jay put the herbs down. They had permeated the late-autumn air, vexing Louis’ dawning heartburn. She shrugged into one arm of the paisley robe. Briefly he considered what time it was.

“I woke up,” she said, gaze somewhere off his head in recollection, “when he came downstairs. The telly was still on, so he tried turning it off, and well, I’d fallen asleep on the couch.”

She nodded, wetted her thumb and dipped it into some excess sugar on the tabletop.

Louis repeated, “When did Harry leave?”

Jay hung in the memory. Frost dredged the windows; from the outside, some kids had written _Happy Halloween!_ with sloppy fingers.

She looked at it, said, “He apologised.”

Louis returned to his room.

Barren light fused with the ceiling lamp. A ghostly concoction. He shut it off, opened the window for air only to find it already loose. He examined the lawn.

The first snow had come and gone during the night. Cold stemmed from the entire window nook and when he gripped the rucksack he found its head crisp, the kind of feeling resting on the other side of the pillow would infuse.

He let his palm settle. He stared at the note tacked to the front of the rucksack.

 

_I THOUGHT ABOUT THIS. I’M SORRY._

Louis withdrew. His hand had left heat on the fabric and he found himself wondering how Harry had handled the rucksack. Picking at some pine needles at his hands, he noted the blinds to be folded in Harry’s room.

There was no telling if anyone occupied the room. His texts had gone unanswered. He had hoped to see footprints from his door to Harry’s, but the night had killed their memory. At least Harry had taken the condoms with him.

Someone had taken advantage of the coming winter with a busy chimney and removal of their gnarly decorations down the lane.

Louis pushed at the window to let it in. Prickly firewood filled in for the bland taste in his mouth.

He reached for the zippers.


	9. Truth be told

_EVERY STORY MUST GROW OLD_

* * *

 

Below Liam’s jersey and muscle top, his arms shone with scratches. Those at his wrists commemorated with hunting joggers in thorns and saplings. The wayward one splitting his bicep did not.

Doniya nursed them best she could when he exposed it in the canteen. At home, she had mentioned to Zayn that they must have been hidden all week, for raw skin replaced clotted blood in breaching his spray-tan. It had that bumpy texture, as if someone had tried erasing filthy text from the muscle and ended up with just the faded letters and crumpled paper.

Louis and Zayn ate quickly that day. On the way out, Zayn rustled half his meal from the plate and left Louis to apologetically scoop squashed potatoes from the tiles.

Cut-outs from Mr Horan’s article on the Run were passed around in the schoolyard. Kids about Lottie’s age animatedly kindled speculations about movie adaptions and TV-opportunities based in the events. Younger and older students both discussed it solemnly between periods, if at all. Among others gathered over recent months, the article had been enlarged and taped to the student council’s board.

In a clique of jocks, Harry and his head of sagging curls poked up. They sat by the tables on the other side of the schoolyard with a herd of non-athletes around them. In spite of the distance, Louis perceived inquiries about the weekend. The herd had started out a trio consisting of Moss’ girlfriend and her friends. Over the course of the week, it had grown into something uncontrollable. While Harry and Liam would have taken turns leading the flock, both had stepped down for the Chief’s son.

As Zayn kept marching, Louis allowed himself to stare as Harry flicked dirt from his sullen jersey and looked back up at him.

Though Louis had kept texting, his messages remained unanswered and when he quit last period, Harry had already gone home or left for practice.

They stared at each other. But before Louis lost track of Zayn somewhere there in front of him, he turned away. Harry pretended to listen to something irrelevant Moss gestured about.

“You have to check the rucksack today.”

They sat in the outskirts, on a bench with soggy cigarette stashes molten into the asphalt and carved confessions in the wood. Its previous juvenile occupant biked off through a puddle, twirling on the back tyre. The jock clique leniently disbanded at the prospect of storm in the horizon.

Louis said, “I’m not ready.”

“I’m sick of seeing you like this. Frankly, I’ll open the bloody thing if you don’t.”

“I’m not ready.” He picked his head up, stretched his frozen fingers. “Look, we talked about Gemma all night. And I gave him head. So I just don’t feel like dealing with anything of this right now.”

Zayn didn’t say anything for a long while. Then, “You could have told me.”

“I know, I— Okay, I’m realising this is becoming a recurring theme between us. So that’s what happened. And you already know about the mannequin.”

“And I already know about the mannequin.”

“But I can’t tell you what he told me. I don’t know what to make of it yet.”

For once, Zayn didn’t rebut. His attention rested elsewhere.

Liam Payne made way for them across the asphalt.

With a fist full of leaves and ash, Zayn watched him come. A conglomeration of wry perfumes and an ever-sustaining gleam of sweat flowed around him when he swayed to a stop a little too close to them. Louis subtly shuffled across the bench.

Pocketing his hands for the fifth time, Liam drew something in the gravel with his heel.

“How is Safaa?” he asked.

Zayn leaned back, all pointy knees and calmly defiant chin.

He said, “If you want to fuck Doniya she’d rather you ask her yourself, as would I.” Bits of her nail polish striated Liam’s scalp, now that Louis cocked his head. “If you’re asking _me_ , we’re pretty shaken still.”

Liam regarded him. Rosy-cheeked and teary from the wind, he looked less the successor his parents deserved, and more the snotty schoolboy whose privileges had failed to bear him for the first time. In him, Louis recognised a void.

If possible, Liam became even _less_ the longer Zayn looked at him.

“How is she?” he asked again.

“Maybe your family could help paying the hospital bills.”

Liam gazed at them for a while before leaving.

Louis noticed that Harry had been standing a few yards behind, observing. He parted with Liam and the two shared a joint before heading indoors.

The storm hit.

 

✘

 

Under an umbrella embossed with the county’s logo, Louis grieved a bleeding hangnail while Zayn proclaimed, “I have a theory.”

“It’s rarely _theories_ with you,” Louis said. He wasn’t listening.

Each knock of his boots to fallen acorns brought him closer to the rucksack. To zippers glimmering in morning light. To preserved scents of Harry and of his past.

“I was thinking about what you said regarding Greg’s motorcycle, and it doesn’t make sense, except in this context: the brakes hadn’t been tampered with; he never died, but was abducted, and his family was just too embarrassed to tell.”

The now jaggedly severed hangnail coaxed a hiss from Louis. “That’s what you’ve got? It’s— I’m not sure that even qualifies as a theory.”

Zayn purposefully bumped him when stepping over a runnel in the dirt road. The umbrella keeled. Turning onto Louis’ street, they joined forces in folding it. A senior couple playing backgammon in their tin-roofed conservatory watched in bewilderment. The roof clattered.

“No, wait. Let me rephrase.” Louis swatted rain from his face. It soaked his socks, the way before them, the world behind them. “When _I_ suggest he might’ve been abducted I’m being outrageous.”

“Or you could notice the trend.”

With a lacklustre _hello_ , Louis led them into the hallway. Lottie didn’t reply. No Honda occupied the driveway.

He tossed clothes and boots into already occupied nooks. He could still taste the foul abrasive collar he’d nibbled on, perking from his throat. The exposure had resulted in red marks before Zayn whipped out the umbrella, which now resided on the porch.

“The trend,” Zayn said and sat on the kitchen table; his toes brushed the floor where Louis’ did not, “Of vanishing siblings.”

About to retort, Louis heard the _click_ of pieces fitting.

“Of yours, of my little sister, of Greg, of Gemma… Of Liam’s sisters.”

Zayn’s phone beeped. Louis stood back as he got to the floor, watched him pray as he tried to understand. When he understood, he poured them yoghurt and fruity cereal.

Folding the blinds, he turned on the ceiling light and all the little fixtures of faux candles and luminous sheep grazing the brick mantelpiece. His mother had been a collector long before he had began to obsess over his perfumes.

The fireplace had never been used, which had vexed Louis in the beginning – if anything, kindling a fire after a school day of hail and snowballing kids would have nearly weighed up for living in the countryside. Jay had been all but discouraged at the bathroom leak, at the chimney laden in lichen. She had soot under her nails.

Louis lit it all up. Then he waited.

Zayn grabbed a bowl but didn’t sit. He picked out dry cereal and crumbled them like icing. A satisfying crunching.

“Of Liam’s sisters?” Louis said. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Just think about it. Safaa and Lottie were targeted as precaution – they must’ve been. So maybe Greg found something out. Maybe, Ruth and Nicola didn’t put up with it anymore.”

Louis felt frail. The yoghurt tasted sour.

“That’s my theory.”

Louis rose.

He said, “Let’s open the rucksack.”

It hadn’t moved, of course. Yet somehow it had changed since Harry had dropped it off. It belonged less to him, less to the prickly firewood and rusted Volkswagens in the clearing.

It was emptier, Louis realised, than it had been on their night. Harry had left the essentials.

Zayn leaned on the dresser and said nothing. Cogs pleasured a dull engine behind his eyes; idly he pried cornflakes from between his teeth. His pensive beauty was as petrifying as the prospect of opening the rucksack.

More than anything, Louis hated him for fuelling the gruesome turmoil in his gut, for relishing the silence as if it was just another riddle, just another gateway into the massive underground system they’d been chipping away at with spoons for shovels, as if it didn’t jeopardise this new life in the suburbs, being needed and at ease.

Then Zayn suggested, humourlessly, “It could be a gift,” and Louis jerked the zippers apart.

He found his journal.

Unable to lift it, he clutched the maw of the rucksack so the outside gloom exposed its stark front and chubby letters on dog-eared pages he’d folded for the sake of looking invested rather than Zayn’s markings made for quick returns.

Familiar scents crystallised him. The strips of denim from Zayn’s massacred jeans brushed his wrist. Knees bonked out next to him and without warning Louis was staring at himself in Zayn’s hand, the gash from a scissor in his head, the ashes dredging the tips of his plastic hair.

“It smells like you,” Zayn said.

“Terre D’Hermés.”

Louis sat back, let Zayn go through the rest, which he did leniently.

Twisting the tiny doll, Louis noted freckles of red marker added from a vicious bout of acne, years back. Not to mention the time Lottie had tried to tame his amorphous hair and ended up slicing off his chalky collar. Now his neck missed a chunk of flesh and the Lottie equivalent had two uneven ponytails.

Harry’s ravenous thumbs had filled out the crevices.

“There are pictures here,” Zayn announced.

Hand lax off his thigh, his crouched figure assessed the evidence. He had skin mirroring the earthy ashes from his father’s cigars, which Louis had grown familiar with through its specks on the borrowed coat, still smelling of profound ditches with algae-infused ridges. Investigating suited him. Somehow, everything ghastly that had happened seemed to play into his hands, seemed to become just another setting for him to operate in. Always knowing what to do. The only constant in the glitch.

Louis tucked the doll into his chest. “I have one of his tees.”

“What’s that?”

“Zayn, I’ve borrowed it. He’s borrowed it.”

Zayn tossed him the photographs. Their motive was limpid despite fair odds of conjuring blurred snapshots, yet below, further down in the stack, the blurriness appeared.

Zayn said, “This isn’t borrowing; this is for life. There is nothing caring about this.”

While looking at himself, Louis dully noted how he had thinned out over autumn. Something appeared to burst below his flesh, sucking in and puffing out bones in spots he had barely located previously. Knots growing into nests of stress. Licks of purple on his forearms.

Harry had magnificently captured his deterioration, a topic Louis hadn’t even thought of in passing previously. He had been good since the move. He hadn’t counted ribs or smeared lotion on cracked knuckles or tended his heels hardening and bleeding from hours of searching on foot or set aside time to look up symptoms for anxiety and paranoia and self-help to practise in the home.

Putrid loathing filled him at the thought of Harry’s lens capturing him this way. Harry must find him miserable. Maybe that had been a thrilling subject to study.

Zayn retrieved the photographs blown across the floor.

“Don’t look at the rucksack right now,” he said while crouching by Louis’ side once again.

“Liam put him up to this,” Louis said. The Horans’ windlass jangled through weak windows. “No, I know what you’re going to say, but it’s Liam’s fault. There’s a clear answer for a change.”

“That’s the reason why they’ve been so close, then? Another case of blackmail?”

The _whole town_ stood upon blackmail, Louis wanted to bellow. Upon eggshell paint over bloodied fences, a foundation of emotionally distraught families with barbed fists and business cards for boutiques wheezing with the last of local kindness. Upon a kingdom who had given up hope for the return of their king.

The king was back.

Louis shrugged. He let the motion be careless, be dismayed, and outlined it with his betrayal.

Although at a caring distance, Louis could taste the yoghurt on Zayn’s breath from where he crouched, attempting his best to not pay any attention to the discovery. As if it’d help.

Louis shrugged and said, “We could just ask Niall.”

“Louis, I need you to understand this: Niall’s not mates with Liam and me. He doesn’t have mates. He has contacts. And right now, with the move, with Liam starting to act for himself instead of at someone else’s hand, he’s cutting ties. Don’t you think he loved seeing the posters? Don’t you think he arranged the welcome back party all on his own?”

Burying his face, Louis focused on the dirtied ridges of his palm, the scent of crisp branches and of the overripe apples disgracing his lawn. “I don’t… No, I don’t want to talk. Can you _please_ shut the blinds?”

The room darkened. Zayn left the lights out.

“Do you want to talk to Harry?” he asked.

Louis shrugged. He meant _No_.

Stashing away the thieved items, Zayn took Louis under his arm, ripped jeans slobbering over Louis’ chipped knuckles.

“We can stop searching,” Zayn said. He meant _Harry knew_. He meant _My sisters are safe_.

Louis couldn’t help but wonder if Zayn had been aware of the theft. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that Niall was the centrepiece to finding it out.

 

✘

 

Jay hadn’t come home for hours.

The kitchen smelt obscurely of thyme over roasted potatoes and a flare of meat which had since long faded with straying juices on the counter. Louis reckoned that meant she had been home for lunch, and confirmed this when discovering the food packed deep in the fridge, sans all smells but the profound chill.

She hadn’t stuck any notes to the metal, or between the specks of sea salt still adorning the leek-infested cutting board. Louis had always admired her for stringing their family together, for, in both siblings’ eyes, trivial matters such as cleaning up everyone’s messes.

It surprised him when he realised their kitchen had rarely been orderly since moving.

When he wasn’t peering through the curtains fronting Harry’s house, he dampened his fingertips and dipped them in the crumbs, suckling while drifting around the bottom floor.

Upstairs, Lottie made little noise, only disturbed by snaps in the hallway when crossing from her room to the bathroom, or Waliyha racketing about their History assignment.

Lottie’s rucksack stood dripping at the foot of the stairs. With his foot, Louis scooted a towel over, probably one of hers forgotten there. The salt foamed on his tongue. He felt heady.

It surpassed dinner, and Jay hadn’t come home. Louis ordered pizza and brought both girls down to the living room, where he disregarded the couch in favour of the floor. The girls slobbered tomato sauce onto cushions. Louis told them he’d fix it later. Disinterested, Lottie flicked some onto his nose. Then she laughed, shyly at first, then roaring when he tried to lick it off.

They didn’t watch Saw, or any of the mainstream horror Lottie had requested. They watched one of Louis’ pretentious indie flicks, relying heavier on screenplay than characters and plot, dashed with introspective quotes unfitting for the landscape. He’d discovered it while still in the city. It calmed him when drunkards clamoured down his street, after his first break-up, when his dad packed up in a flurry of unpaid taxes and broken glass, after his mother announced that their flat was on the market.

Shortly after they had devoured half the pizza, Waliyha mentioned Zayn having a penchant for the genre. Louis wasn’t surprised.

Although expecting it, Louis jerked at the knock on the door. It was a purposeful knock, brief and solid, and he couldn’t breathe. He stood, surveying the windows as he toed towards the thump.

“Is that Harry?” Lottie spoke from the couch.

Niall Horan held up a rake on the other side of the door.

Louis shook his head, not realising she couldn’t see him.

“I have something to ask you,” he said.

Melted snow prickled in the furrows of Niall’s forehead. It visited his hackneyed laughter lines before fusing with the leaves below his soles.

“That would certainly be appropriate. Grab the rake.”

Steamed by Niall’s palm, the tool weighed in Louis’ grip. His arm quivered up to a meagre bicep.

He jerked a coat off the nearest hanger and stepped outside. They wouldn’t be long. He would only be on the other side of the fence.

From nowhere Niall unfurled an umbrella to carry over Louis’ sloped back. It obscured Louis’ view of anything but the Horans’ backyard, boastful even in the drabness of early winter. There was the now rusted swing set in the foreground. Or the motorcycle veiled by neglect and dead thistles, where fumes could no longer be smelled and the memory of a joyride remained a thorn of nostalgia. It felt as if Louis had suffered a personal loss, watching it perish as everything around it flourished.

It felt as if they were hurdling forward through the snow, and Louis’ sneakers gobbled up slush along the shovelled path and Niall steadied him while both clung to the rake.

Leaves had assembled below one of the oaks severing the back fence, this one ailing. Its boughs keened in the evening breeze. Nails of wind collapsed into Louis’ cheek, diminishing slightly when they stopped and Niall tilted the umbrella against the onslaught. Louis started raking without question.

“As you know, I’m leaving,” Niall opened. “Living here is unsustainable and there’s no potential left in this joint. I don’t want to be part of the investigation any longer.”

His now gloved hands played together idly around the umbrella’s shaft whereas the rest of his body sought calm. Against the world, his exuberance paled and was replaced by wariness. It couldn’t be identified as the politeness he wielded at staged dinners and in public with his family. This distance fit into an unlabelled category.

Facetted as Niall was, it made Louis uneasy. Most situations did, these days.

“You’re my mate, Louis. My only, it seems. I’m not interested in punishing you for what’s happened this autumn.”

“Punish me?” Louis rested the rake against the oak. Realisation overcame him. “You caused the wounds on Liam’s arms.”

“Naturally.”

Zayn had let it slip that the gash across Liam’s bicep had required a handful of stitches. As Niall removed a glove, Louis noted his blunt nails, bitten to the bone.

“Did you punish Zayn?” he asked.

“He’s niched in sabotaging himself. Maybe if I had poked around with him, I would have _solved_ his problems.”

The rake nosed upon a pile of rocks below the crusted leaves and crystallised insects. Louis took a moment to breathe and listen for Lottie’s woeful cries inside their house, or a creak of Harry’s window. But all was still. Overhead, the oaks susurrated about their newfound nudity. Next to him, Niall patted down his bolshie winter coat with hands puckered red by neglect.

“I’m… glad,” Louis decided, “That you won’t be punishing me.”

He raked. A pile began amounting as the breeze sharpened into hail.

Niall assessed his work.

“People like us don’t deserve these times we’ve been given,” he said.

“So Liam deserved it?”

“Liam survived.” Somehow more sombre than usual, he added, “Which is quite miraculous when you think about what Safaa went through. Or the counselling my family and I paid for after my brother.”

“Did Liam’s family kill Greg? Where are his sisters?”

Niall took the rake from his hand so that a splinter incised Louis’ palm. He clutched it, fighting to keep quiet while the flutter of pain ignited his thoughts.

Cogs shifted behind Niall’s eyes.

“His sisters won’t come back.”

“Is that punishment as well?”

“It’s most definitely a punishment. The question is, who is it a punishment for?”

“For what happened to Greg. Or—“

Niall jabbed the rake to Louis’ chest; air gushed from his lungs upon impact with the ice-gritted oak behind. A wilderness eviscerated Niall’s haughty stance.

“I _never_ wanted Greg to die. Somehow, I didn’t get a say. Everything that’s happened afterwards is just collateral.”

“Everything?”

Louis searched for something familiar in Niall’s face to fixate on. There was no craze to his words, no anxious flaring of nostrils. Only his fists spoiled the tranquil, blocks of iron curdling in Louis’ chest. He was still in control.

“You wouldn’t be dandy if they’d murdered Charlotte.” His iron fists melted.

Louis seized the rake before it fell and shielded himself against the flare of cold wind where Niall’s body had met his. He caught his breath.

“A man knocked on our door a few years ago, one of the first escapees of the trade,” Niall said, steadying a knack in his voice. “His car had broken down right here in town and his mouth had been slit, proper Cheshire Cat on that one. Last I heard of him he was on meds in some facility where you take your dinner in liquids. He has to live with that. So yeah, Liam survived.”

As if he could see the blood on his hands, Niall held them up to the faraway spotlights spattered in the garden.

Louis swallowed and discovered that he had been shuffling away from Niall. He fixed himself to the snow. The rake pulsated in his grasp, its rust-free metal tines cool despite the flare in his cheeks.

“Maybe you should talk to Zayn,” Niall suggested. He stood unfaltering in the dusk, his filmy hair ablaze and his laughter lines growing taut. “See if you two can crack this case.”

Louis tossed the rake.

Scurrying back to the house, he glimpsed a shadow shifting by Harry’s window. Once inside, he checked the locks twice.

Miraculously he convinced the girls to follow him to Zayn’s. Within minutes he had snacks, bathroom articles, and DVDs of 90s sitcoms jammed into his old gym bag. While a piece of him yearned for the stench of overripe fruit to have vanished from the bag, most of him pressed forward, always forward, through the hassle of outerwear in the hallway and through the treacherously shimmering asphalt.

Zayn looked less than surprised to see him. Nonetheless, a familiar layer of dread and fatigue crowned his composure.

“Waliyha—?“

Louis interrupted him with, “My mum isn’t home yet. Fancy a sleepover?”

To the best of his ability, he ushered the three of them inside.

“Louis—?”

Long lustrous hair billowed behind Zayn as Doniya treaded down the stairs. She swept the girls away without a look but not hasty enough to veil her sunken eyes and sloppy eyeliner. He overhead them discussing sitcoms in the kitchen. He smelt the freshly mixed smoothies.

“Louis,” Zayn said.

Louis’ voice came in a hiss, battling for discretion. “Niall killed Ruth and Nicola. Niall or Niall’s family did or something.” He swallowed, out of breath from adrenaline rather than sprinting, then nodded to himself. “Also, we need to talk about Liam.”

“About or _with_? Because I have him in my basement right now.”

When Louis hugged him, Zayn’s arms were warm on him. He hadn’t noted their height difference before, but now a chin nudged the top of his ear and a soft Adam’s apple shifted against his cheek. Stubble matured along Zayn’s, yet to become bold.

Zayn guided him down the stairs with the movement of a caretaker tending for his seniors. In proving his stability, Louis shoved ahead. Hands seized his waist.

“Safaa is home,” Zayn said silently.

Candlelight waltzed around the corner, in spite of the many hereditary lamps enthroning a coffee table. They stopped midway down. Louis saw the cluttered walls and floors of the hobby room; the boards of newspaper clips featuring Zayn’s involvement, books about conspiracy theories, an open drawer of dolls and scrapbook supplies.

“She is?” he asked.

“Yeah, she…” Zayn pressed the hell of his palm to his eye. “She’s in mum and dad’s bedroom. They’re being questioned by police, my parents. It’s just me and Doniya – well, and Liam now.”

“Mum might be questioned as well,” Louis realised.

Zayn nodded, mouth clamped shut as he glanced towards the assortment of lights. Violet dented his cheekbone.

“Who have you fought?” Louis asked, yearning to run his fingers across the bruise, dapple it with icy water.

As if embarrassed, Zayn touched his cheek. But his expression exposed anything but shame.

“Liam, naturally,” he replied. “Difficult not to when Safaa kept reiterating his name. Among other things.”

The underlying dread Louis experienced magnified when Zayn left out an elaboration. They entered the basement.

Liam rose with the purpose and obedience of a soldier marred by tight sleep schedules and sparse rations. But his sharp edges had mellowed. The gashes on his arms had recently begun to heal, void of all stitches sans two at a particularly wide chasm. He had lost the grace to bear a smile when Zayn’s knuckles crashed into him.

“Hi, Louis,” he said.

Just within sight, Zayn cupped his knuckles. Liam barely glanced, his steps ticking back and forth across the floor. Long ago the legs of tables and valiant children had slighted it; akin to Liam’s scars, the fissures had now softened.

“How are you here?” Louis said.

“Doniya,” both Liam and Zayn answered at once.

“He’s remorseful,” Zayn said with an overly succulent tone. He prowled around the room, marking territory with a hand on the assortment of lamps, kicking stray dolls with his heels. Just as Liam was about to elaborate, Zayn stopped and turned back to Louis. Liam was hopelessly stuck between them while Zayn spoke. “Doniya said he was. That he really _did have_ something to say—“

“Gemma killed herself.”

The news made Zayn quieten. While Louis only slackened in the jaw, Zayn had to sit down on an armrest. Visibly he glanced to the ceiling, to the susurration of feminine voices above.

“I know that,” Liam continued. His words came faster with the attention. “Harry told me that. And I know other things about him as well.”

At first Louis just blinked. Then aggravation popped inside him, followed by his usual apprehension. “Did you help him get into my house? Did you know that he was stalking me?”

“What? He was?”

Louis tossed his hands into the air.

“You’d know she’d killed herself wouldn’t you? You hung her up there, in the woods. What did you have to gain?” Louis tried again. “Why write _‘murder’_?”

Veins now mottled Liam’s forehead like unshed tears on one’s cheeks. He didn’t pace anymore.

“I didn’t,” he said.

“Harry told me about Gemma as well. And he appointed you as the responsible for that mannequin.”

“I didn’t string it up! Niall did! This…” Liam grappled for something. “I need to talk about that. How Harry loathes him, or how… What happened to Harry and Gemma before this.”

Louis heard him speak but couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. He couldn’t comprehend whether the anguish he expressed was faux or to be trusted. It felt as if very little was to be trusted nowadays.

“That’s clearly bull,” Zayn said after he’d gotten off the couch and palmed Louis’ shoulder. He spoke in that secretive way of leaning forward, almost past the ear, with Liam’s eyes pinned on his back. Except Zayn’s words packed power that couldn’t be contained in a whisper.

The dulled bruise on Liam’s cheekbone glimmered in the candlelight when Louis asked, “Do you know what happened to your sisters?”

Dead-eyed and pulling a hangnail bloody, Liam looked away. No answer.

Louis started over. “Liam, do you—“

“I’m starting to. Yeah, I’ve started figuring out they’re not coming back. It won’t be like with Safaa—“

Zayn bulked. “If you say her name again I’ll blind you.”

“This is Greg, Zayn! They’re Greg.”

Zayn didn’t relent, but his fists stayed at his sides.

“Not in this house,” he said, and Louis could tell he was listening more to his sisters speaking upstairs than he did to the basement conversation. “We can talk someplace else. Put on some clothes and let’s go.”

On the unknown path forward, Louis burrowed into what clothes he had successfully snatched before leaving for Zayn’s. Streetlights bleakly torched the snow underfoot as well as the knobbed icicles slouching off exquisitely linear roofs.

They walked in line, the three of them. Zayn had lent Louis a beanie that sloped over his eyebrows, yet somehow aerated his forehead. Liam walked poorly clad in autumn wear. But whereas Louis was all clattering teeth and mounting anxiety, Liam kept his stride. He walked like he had purpose. All that was fallible to the image was his red-speckled cheeks. Louis didn’t know when he had started crying, or if he still was, or if Zayn had even noticed.

Zayn led the way while the others lagged behind. Clarion bells rang from the church up ahead. It was an ominous call in the night, one that disguised Liam’s footsteps as he approached Louis.

At the sound of his name, Louis jolted. Narrowly avoiding an iced puddle, his glare softened when taking in Liam’s face, so out of character.

“Louis,” Liam said again, and now Louis could tell he wasn’t crying – the choke in his throat signalled impending tears, “I swear Harry didn’t tell me. I never knew about what he did to you. I didn’t— There’s been a lot of things I haven’t had any knowledge about.”

Louis pondered how to answer when Zayn stopped amidst the street. At first they just looked at the steeple far ahead. Louis recalled creeping alongside the mossed stonewalls and wading through the tombstones. But then Zayn walked off-path where weeds had blossomed only months ago and where broken glass still lay on the frozen earth by the arcade. Since last, someone had tried taping the gaping windows shut. Weather had torn the sheet apart and chipped the frame of wood.

They slithered through the common entrance – a hole in the wall through which Louis could painfully see Niall guiding him with sunlight igniting his newly dyed hair while they parted from the summery sounds outdoors. Inside they scrambled from the entryway and lodged back some old planks to cover it.

Louis crossed some snow that had foamed into the shed and settled down by the counter.

Zayn jerked the handle to an ancient pinball machine. The mechanics still worked, but no lights announced victory or defeat on the board above.

“This is the place,” he announced, if only to thaw the silence. He stopped toying with the machines and stared out into the room.

Things remained quiet for some time, until Liam asked, “Is Safaa all right?”

Zayn kept his tone mild. “She’s alive.”

“Liam, your parents were at the site where we found her. At Midsummer Manor, about forty minutes south,” Louis said.

“You already know that Niall and his family are leaving,” Liam said, drilling his naked hands into his armpits for warmth while he circled the pool table, “But my parents are also heading off.”

“Just your parents?”

“I don’t think they ever intended for me to go with them. For…” Liam took a moment to assemble himself and stared to the ceiling. “For my sisters to go with them.”

This alerted Zayn, who straightened up after having leaned against the pinball machine. “When are they leaving?”

“Niall is leaving permanently as soon as possible,” Louis answered in Liam’s place.

Liam just nodded.

The stool creaked when Zayn sat down on it by the counter, after dusting snowflakes from the slashed leather. He gave Louis’ gloved hand a quick squeeze.

“What more do you have on Harry?” Louis asked. He felt rusty from keeping quiet. As if he needed oil to operate smoothly again.

“He’s been in the trade,” Liam answered. “Before Sunny, he was in the trade.”

The cogs jarred to a halt in Louis’ chest. His head weighed a thousand suns.

“So he knew about Safaa,” Zayn said with his eyes blistering and trained on Louis. “Did he fucking take her? And Lottie?”

“He’s not involved with her, as far as I’m… You know. No, he was _in_ the trade. That’s where he comes from.”

“So why move _here_ if he’d once fled it? How could he even stand to look you in the face?”

“It’s the same with Gemma! And I don’t know about their folks but I—“

“Have you even realised the shit you’ve put them through? She’s got scars all over now and when she’s awake she can’t bear to look at us. She flinches when I cradle her. She flinches. Did you hurt her first hand, or just watch your parents go at it?”

“Zayn,” Louis managed.

Whatever was left of Liam looked ready to crack from the inquisition, if Zayn’s avaricious fist didn’t get to it first.

“I don’t know,” Liam whispered out. He glanced to Louis’ inert figure, then said, “They never let me in on anything. But there have been patterns. Greg.” He paused. “Greg. My sisters. Yours. Don’t you think they found out?”

The words hung between them.

Louis turned the answers over in his head in disbelief. But no matter the angle, his sluggish thoughts ran into the same dead end.

“It’s Mr and Mrs Payne,” he said. “And Niall harmed Safaa. His parents are in on it.”

Liam quietly agreed. Relief oozed all around him, most likely from easing his weighted chest. But in the shed, under Zayn’s fist, he still quivered, slowed down, stopped thinking.

Louis did the opposite.

“Niall made the cuts on Liam’s arms,” he said and could sense Liam nodding somewhere in the murky black, “He talked about punishing people. Punishing you too, Zayn.”

Zayn remained jittery. The little composure he had gained from his own made-up truth was vanishing.

“And Harry loathes Niall. He’s said they’ve known each other for ages – several times. And that hates goes the other way around as well, you both know it.” Louis pressed his palm to his eyes as if it would help him sort out the images, all the words he hadn’t strung together. “I think Gemma had an anxiety attack when we discovered some… We found rope and pills and other things behind this wall in Liam’s closet. Or it might have been a panic attack, I don’t quite know the difference.”

“You broke into my house?”

Louis lifted his head.

Zayn had stopped piling snow with his shoes and now just leaned against the dried liquids on the counter. Though Liam didn’t repeat the question, it was as if it bounced in Louis’ head until all other thoughts vanished.

Keeping his eyes cast on the floor, Zayn offered, “Maybe we should see what Harry says.”

Louis made an unhappy sound.

“Maybe _we_ should see what Harry says,” Zayn emphasised.

“Maybe we should call the police,” Louis said in a small voice.

“I have.”

Both looked towards Liam.

“I have!” Liam said again. “My parents don’t know but nothing will happen tonight so maybe what we should do—” He sighed and batted at a ruddy cheek. “—Is go to sleep.”

No one protested.

They slithered out of the hole, over the yard of broken glass. The night was rigid around them and offered little space for error. Louis felt they were all walking malware, praying to pass the firewall unnoticed. Ice crackled on the street below them.

“They’re building a case,” Liam said when Louis asked if there was more they could do, while Zayn trudged the path ahead of them. “Anytime now, I think they’ll strike. They obviously haven’t been vocal about it.”

“You’re going to lose your family,” Louis said.

Liam was crying again. And so Louis kept his mouth sealed on their way home, eyes as dead as the air around them.

On Zayn’s porch, Doniya swayed solemnly in the rope hammock. Blankets and jackets encompassed her, but the chrysalis couldn’t cover her strained expression. No one sat with her. The bile-green family car had parked in the driveway during their absence and people moved within the house.

Once they reached the steps, Zayn turned to Liam and said, “I don’t want you in the same house as Safaa.”

Louis watched Liam slump. The ground tugged him into itself.

“I can’t go home now. They won’t let me in. Come on, Zayn.”

This wasn’t something Louis wanted to witness at this hour. He spared no eyes to the environment as he snuck up the stairs. Yet he still heard the pleading, as well as the denial behind him.

Doniya stopped him in the doorway.

“Your mum knows where you are,” she said.

Louis didn’t understand. Then he did and held his forehead.

“Fuck.” In a faint effort he shook his head. “I forgot…”

“Just stay here tonight. Lottie is probably still up. She’s been waiting for you.”

The Malik household was a strange enclave to experience that night.

Twice the usual amount of shoes and coats adorned the clean-cut hallway so Louis had to shimmy past them to come through. Mr and Mrs Malik lounged in the living room to a late talk show, woven tight in the couch like intergrown trunks. Fire suffocated among the cinders in the fireplace before them.

Mr Malik turned to gaze at where Louis lingered in the doorway, but whatever he told Mrs Malik went beneath the dishwasher’s gargle. As he pattered on, Louis noticed the remains of smoothies and biscuits in the kitchen.

Yelling picked up outdoors while Louis headed upstairs. Only one door stood open.

Lottie had her feet above the headboard, lightly tapping to the soft tune floating from her phone. She kept a crumpled paper in the air, not bouncing it off the wall the way she always did.

Louis stepped around the bedding strewn across the floor. Neither said much. But as he sat, Lottie sluggishly crawled up to his side. They were carrying the world.

“Is Doniya sleeping here?” he asked.

She hummed.

“And Waliyha as well,” he filled in. “I’ll crash with Zayn right down the hall. You and I will be back to normal soon. And mum won’t have to stress as much.”

“Liam is here,” she said. “Where did you go?”

“The arcade.”

“I’ve never been into it.”

“Nothing to see there. Really, it’s just a load of soggy wood. Some machines are still there, out of function of course.”

Snow consumed the world outside. Flirting at first, then raging. While Louis quietly marvelled at its expanse, Lottie twirled to the hallway, where Liam and Doniya could be heard talking.

Lottie admitted, “I don’t want to know what’s going on. The suburbs, I… I want to move back to the city. I hate it here.” She sat up. “Can’t Waliyha and her family move with us?”

After a quick stride of footfalls, Zayn halted in the doorway, eyes flitting between the siblings. No new bruises garnished his hands.

“Louis, we’ll take the floor. In here.” Authority had slipped back into his voice, though he tacked on, “If she’s all right with her and Waliyha sharing,” when laying eyes on the part of their bundle that was Lottie Tomlinson. “Are you?”

She nodded.

“You should help her choose movies. She’s downstairs raking through old DVDs right now.”

Louis let her go. Reluctantly she stepped across the shorthaired carpet and after a moment of thought, she pattered down the hallway. Zayn closed the door.

“We should brush our teeth first,” Louis said faintly.

Zayn didn’t sit. “Police will talk to Safaa in the morning. See if she’ll say anything more than she did in the hospital. So if Liam… If he hasn’t been spewing shite that should be enough, right?”

“Enough?”

“To take on the trafficking.” He finally allowed himself to slump onto the mattress. “Have you talked to Harry?”

“I’d rather he talked to the police.” It meant _nothing has changed_.

Zayn nodded.

When they went to sleep, and their sisters whispered over the murmur of a rom-com, and Zayn’s restless dreaming tore him from slumber, Louis wondered how much time they had left.


	10. Sweetness

_DO YOU THINK YOU DESERVE YOUR FREEDOM?_

* * *

 “Harry is calling you.”

Zayn’s chest jolted while he spoke, and Louis with it. The rest of the Maliks, and Liam, had relocated to the kitchen, where the telly blared a newscast and forks met with porcelain.

At some point during the night, Louis had hauled himself up against the bed. Since he had quivered so badly, Zayn had joined him with the abandoned duvet. Louis had woken up on his shoulder.

Now they’d gone back to their mattresses, dust specking the gloomy sunlight filtering in while Zayn hoisted himself to his elbows. He removed the phone from his ear, stared at it, then displayed it to Louis.

“It’s the fifth time.”

“Hang up.”

“Can I take the call?”

Apart from the intermittent disturbance of Zayn clearing his throat, Louis could hear Harry’s rasp perfectly well through the speaker. Zayn offered him a lenient look when he got up to dress. While Louis dressed, Liam and Doniya slithered past in the hall. Although he hadn’t been to the Maliks as often as Liam probably had, Louis figured they couldn’t have _that_ many bedrooms. Or rooms. He started pondering storages.

“I’m going to soften this for you,” Zayn said, phone pressed to his clavicles to muffle, “But he’s being proper disturbing. And he isn’t telling me anything if he knows.”

Louis watched a door close down the hallway. “Tell him to fuck off.”

Instead, Zayn told Harry something else and finished the call.

“There’s a crowd at Mary’s,” he then told Louis. “Something’s boiling.”

The mystery came to a head that morning, sometime after breakfast.

Policemen and the Malik parents occupied the kitchen, so Zayn and Louis ate in bed, or hawkishly towering by the windows. Meanwhile, Lottie packed and Mrs Malik carried Safaa up the hallway, laying her to rest under supervision. Waliyha eyed Zayn from the doorway and helped bringing down the packing while both big brothers sweltered in questions.

The snowfall eased when the Tomlinson siblings walked home. This made it possible to see the gathering outside the profitable café. Flashes from sirens ignited the fragile downfall.

It immediately brought Louis back to a dinner interrupted by sirens on the Styles’ property, of Harry being taken in chains. And Harry was here in the crowd, apathetic as he could be. But there were no sirens meant for him.

A red-cheeked intendant scooped away people from the plot while stringing out tape. People foamed at the entrance of Mary’s Corner, of which a vast majority were children. These stood behind the tape, weren’t ushered out in the snow. The folks outside, on Louis’ side, stood equally still as him, wary.

In a steady stream, the children left the site in car after car and a chorus of emergency sounds pealed over Sunny Hills. The air ignited with it.

“Do you think he’ll hold some big speech when he gets away?” Lottie asked.

She had let go of his hand and attempted to laden herself with the sports bag. Louis let her.

When he looked up, Harry was just a few feet away.

“I think he’ll burn,” she said.

“Louis,” Harry said, all breath and wide eyes, akin to the way about him he’d had in the woods, beneath a wolf’s mask.

“What the fuck was that note for?”

Harry’s face contorted, but not in the self-depreciating way Louis had expected. Whatever hopeful essence his gait had carried on his way over, it now expanded.

“Did you keep it?” he asked.

“No, I didn’t—“ Louis cast his eyes towards the crowd. “I didn’t keep anything.”

A smile glinted on Harry’s lips, too shy to appear. “Might as well, yeah?”

“Are you being cute right now? Because you can’t… I’m not— I’m not going to explain why stalking is a despicable thing, Harry.” Reminiscent of the arcane photographs, Louis felt his voice faltering, his being receding into a parched and listless pit. He tried to reclaim his stance by saying, “I’m not.”

“Yeah, but… I realise I’ve been a bit invasive—“

Louis grabbed Lottie’s hand only to find it clasped in his already. They two tugged away through the snow, keeping even steps. Faces of children shone in the blank world around, of those with their parents, of those who had skin bitten by labour and darkness.

Harry wasn’t far behind. After a harrowing glare from Louis, he slid away from Lottie and over to his side.

While apologies flew over his head, Louis wondered if a therapist would be able to pinpoint a cause or two for the stalking; a single root slithering back to chains and neglect.

Surely he was reasonably upset; his wounds justified?

The crowd fell behind and the world became grey. Harry’s slate coat tore in the wind.

“You can trust me, Louis. I’m coming clean. Open dialogue! I was checking up on you.”

“So set that aside for a while. You could have moved anywhere but you ended up being Niall’s neighbour. You recognised his voice, his guts, and you could’ve torn him down.”

“But I let it go?” Harry filled in.

Louis acquiesced.

“I had a plan.”

Their houses appeared from the white ahead.

Something moved beyond the curtains of the Tomlinson kitchen. Soon, Jay stood on the steps of their house, urging her children inside. Lottie bolted just as Harry grabbed Louis’ bag in restraint.

“Let me talk,” Harry said.

Louis watched his sister go, felt an increasing weight in his chest. Now that they’d stopped, now that everything had gone stagnant sans the burked roar of nature, his ears ached. Harry’s breaths jarred behind.

Harry went ahead. He said, “I wanted to destroy him. Why’d you think they left all of a sudden?”

Reluctantly, Louis played along. “To pit it on anyone else.”

“Because of me. I replaced him. Took his mates, his reputation, his glory and image, all that he was. I beat him on his own terms. I humiliated him.”

Louis became awash with an eerie notion. Harry could have come on to him solely because of his connection to Niall. How many pictures were there that Louis hadn’t seen? How much was there left behind the scenes?

He didn’t want to know.

“I tore him down,” Harry said, as if the drab in his eyes hadn’t been emphasis enough. “And now everyone has found him out and it’s just all going to buckle below him.”

“So now that Gemma is dead and my sister’s scared of the dark, and my mum’s having a breakdown, was it worth it? Now that your folks only have half a child left?” Louis asked.

His name formed in a plea on Harry’s lips. Knowing it wouldn’t be the end of it, but that staying was more than he could bear, Louis left for his mother still in the doorway. Harry didn’t follow him.

Inside, he didn’t stop, only slung an arm across Lottie’s snow-damp shoulders on his way into the house. A sound chased him through the door.

He watched the ingrained filth in her hair, from old sweat and someone else’s duvet frequently against her strands. Something bigger than him swelled in his chest and throat, blocked him and urged him. He watched the muted telly air a soap opera, and saw his mother in front of the flickering careless drama, and how heavy her shoulders were, how her dusty glasses rested on a rosy nose.

Louis held her gaze and turned his head into his sister’s scalp, wanted to lighten everything up.

Quietly, he said, “I want to kick him in the nuts.”

“You should,” she murmured back.

As they stood, the sound swelled, then became light. People laden with clothing heavy even for winter broke from the cars that had skidded onto the Horan property. A single lamp shimmered behind impeccable glass. No one moved behind the window.

They brought Mr Horan out like one would collect the post on a dazzling Saturday morning. He had some slippers on and tailored slacks. His chin was held high.

 

✘

 

The Tomlinsons had scraps for dinner and kept up a leisurely game of Monopoly.

Louis had his ever-vibrating phone on silent, no longer receiving any calls of any sort. Lottie’s had been stuffed under a cushion in the living room, turned off as well as on airplane mode. Jay’s phone rested in her hand, beneath a husk of knobby and twitching joints. Every sound uttered from awkwardly jarring cupboards or gusts through the aged attic had Jay shying from the door or Louis glancing out the window.

Lottie claimed the most sleazily expensive street by putting Louis deep in debt. He was too busy tapping the bills in his hand to give her the finger, too busy eyeing their mother to give an evil eye.

He asked, “Mum?”

And she looked up as if he had meant to complain about cheating, her edges weary, before she acknowledged him. She was tight lips strung out too hard, nerves in addition to her children’s fidget. Lottie peered up between them.

“Have they found Niall and Mrs Horan yet?”

Jay pried the phone from her grasp and failed to slide it across the table. Her screen was black. She stared at it.

“How can you not know you’re being bribed?” she said.

Lottie turned to him and softly said, “This girl in my year had seen Mrs Horan by the pyramid.”

“I have to have overlooked it,” Jay said. “No one can just fail to recognise that they’re being paid to cover up, can they?”

Louis didn’t know what to say.

His phone began to vibrate and nearly skidded to the floor. He frowned.

“I called Waliyha while you were in the bathroom,” Lottie said. “Couldn’t find my own.”

Louis denied Harry’s call and rolled the dice. He paid his sister a juicy fine.

“Midsummer Manor is under surveillance,” Jay said just as the question crossed Louis’ mind. She looked at him, properly this time.

“So they can’t hide there?”

“There are chains in the cellar. And no toilets, I don’t think. Upstairs there’s a balustrade and this gilded cellar door with two or three locks.” She dismissed the thoughts she didn’t voice. “Surveillance has been going on since before I was brought in for questioning. I didn’t know if I should lie or if— I don’t know what’s considered unlawful and not. We didn’t know.”

“But this is better than the city,” Lottie tried. “I’ve made good friends with people and the class is much calmer and there’s woods and lots of extracurricular activities that actually mean something. Moving here was a good thing. All in all.”

Louis listened and was lulled by the words, knowing the burden had been spread even. The fact itself did little to appease him, but his back straightened and he fought to open his eyes further.

He dodged another incoming call.

The Tomlinsons concocted a tray of crackers and butter and left the game of Monopoly unfinished. They watched cooking shows and intermittently fell asleep and startled on the couch. The women had their phones tucked and didn’t expect any interruptions. They freely greased their fingers with crumbs. Louis’ fingers were clean and his phone burned in his pocket.

The fourth time Louis restlessly jolted awake he had left a damp mark on the couch. He rubbed it off. On the other side of the couch, Lottie ogled the hallway. Then she flitted to the living room windows, beyond Louis’ frozen head.

The doorbell rang, and from the way her hands folded over her kneecaps, it wasn’t the first time. Jay followed her gaze. Eventually, so did Louis.

Curtains were drawn where they could be, in all the rooms, but a sliver still displayed a fervent face in the easing snowfall. It appeared that Harry, on the other hand, couldn’t see the Tomlinsons, so he left a handprint on the glass and moved back around to the front door.

The ringing picked up again.

Instead of reaching out to Lottie, Louis snuck up to the door. He opened.

Harry stepped into the hallway – and Louis shied back in the same movement – all bleached skin and wiry muscles capable of breaking noses and shins. He heaved, somehow quietly.

“I know where Niall is,” he said.

He didn’t have a coat on, so when he took another lunge into the warmth, Louis let him, let the door swing halfway behind him.

“Where?” Louis asked.

And Harry said, “At the cemetery, of course.”

Red glimpsed in the whites of his eyes, blood filtering out in a lake.

Instinctively, Louis reached for his shoulder when Harry wavered, quashing a shudder. The chock of iced flesh preceded the chock of touching him. His hands became useless. He backed away.

“Someone saw Mrs Horan—“

“In Peak Park,” Louis finished but Harry just shook his head.

“Heading south by car. Police and all in her tracks. I tried to call Zayn,” Harry said. “And then I tried to call you.”

Glancing to the living room, Louis dived into a hoodie and jacket, hood flung up. “Zayn didn’t pick up?”

He let Harry steal a corner of his jacket when they exited. At once Louis texted both his mother and sister about his whereabouts and Zayn about bringing a bat and—

“Do you have a bat or a hammer or any tools?” Louis asked, met Harry’s gaze so close to him.

They halted in the middle of the podgy road. The sirens had since long stopped ringing and the falling sun wiped any trace of horizon or sense of direction in a drumming shade of blue. It was as if they had entered static and brought its errors with them into the real world.

Harry took his wrist and moved in the opposite direction. In Niall’s backyard he assembled rakes and a pipe with rusted teeth from Greg’s motorcycle, stacked it in Louis’ arms. It mounted to a fearsome collection. He caressed himself as he scurried around the garden but made no effort to dress in more layers, let alone ask Louis for a garment.

Before he knew it, Louis had his wrist caged once more. They headed on foot in the general direction of the cemetery. Louis tossed him the jacket and burrowed in his hoodie.

They came upon the lichen-coated stonewall and kept ahead. They passed Gemma’s grave. Zayn still hadn’t replied.

The sound headed the sight of him.

Harry kept barrelling forward, constantly readjusting his blotchy grip on the pipe, until Louis knocked him to the ground. Neither spoke. The chipping of granite answered their questions. Near-rustles emitted when Harry rubbed his hands together in hopes of heating them. His eyes were trained on Louis as were their default state, but they conveyed a, to Louis, unfamiliar clarity.

Between tombstones and with his feet crunching old flower bouquets, Louis rose.

Niall stared right at him.

“My mum’s dead, isn’t she?” Niall said.

A presence slithered at Louis’ feet – Harry’s hands in the wet moss and gravel, lips cracked from temperature and abstinence both.

“Quite served her, anyway,” Niall said, then proceeded to read aloud from his tombstone, which Louis couldn’t comprehend until Niall had finished and lowered his eyes to meet Louis’. “ _Niall Horan,_ ” he read haughtily, voice clinging similarly to Mrs Horan’s. “ _Beloved son._ What a fucking cliché.” And he cracked down upon the granite.

The gritty blue ambience grinded his figure into a gnarly piece of urban legend, the kind your oldest cousin terrorised you with as a child. He did nothing to mollify the harshness of it.

Harry hurled the pipe towards his head. It hit aluminium with a clang worthy of church bells.

Louis hadn’t seen him approach, hadn’t heard the oddly triumphant sounds now breaching Harry’s mouth, and though Niall hadn’t either, he managed to dodge by a smidge. The world kept moving.

“Obviously I had nothing to do with it,” Niall said. There was a revealing dip in his voice, a catch of breath. “Obviously I didn’t know about Gemma, Harry, because if I did I would’ve made sure they put you through the same thing.”

“Give me the pipe back so I can bust your throat with it,” Harry countered.

Niall jerked the pipe from the moss and stalked towards them with startling haste. “If I hadn’t been there, maybe it would’ve been you, you know. But why fucking thank me?”

For a moment, a mammoth headstone severed him from Louis’ field of vision. He dived into another row of stones, shoving Harry in the other direction. Louis crawled across beds of wilted petals, now soaked and torn, guiding the rake ahead of him.

The static dissolved when Niall burst from the night. Louis didn’t breathe. But Niall’s hooded figure passed him and plunged his boot into Harry’s abdomen. Harry folded. Filthy light from the lanterns around lit the baseball bat as Niall swung with the same purposive demeanour against Harry’s knees as he’d done regarding his own memorial.

Louis half expected him to break into song.

“First, I’d shave your head, sell those gorgeous locks to some shop of the occult where some middle-aged fuck can jerk to them,” Niall said, bat and pipe aiming relentlessly for Harry’s legs, which kept kicking further along the ice. “I’d place you back in Mary’s. I would—”

Harry sacrificed his forearm for a pelt, then countered with a gauche swoop of his foot to Niall’s kneecap. It collided and painted the crisp air with curses.

Louis crossed a carpet of gravel and leaves and cut the bat from Niall’s grasp. The metal teeth of the rake bit into his jacket and went farther, only prickling the flesh below. Niall wheezed and receded among the stones. Harry took the bat on his way up – briefly Louis acknowledged how his hand properly clenched around the heated material – and drew it in a neat line just in front of Niall’s face. By reflex, Louis held him back.

Already in a curve, Harry’s attack misfired into one of the lanterns. Aluminium hit metal and molten wax and flames rained over their feet. The snowfall was ceasing.

“You can’t fight back, so just let me,” Harry begged while he preyed for Niall’s appearance in the dusk.

“I don’t want to _kill_ him.”

“Louis,” Harry admonished, and Niall came up a mere ten yards away, cheeks aflame and brown roots plaguing his blond locks.

“I’m not a cliché!” he howled.

“They took your dad,” Louis said, reached for something.

“I know, right? And they took Greg, and they drove my mum into the river. She was well smashing the speed limit. Took a few officers with her, or civilians.”

In an afterthought, as if its relevance would somehow mollify his actions, he said, “And the Paynes have gone as well. Liz never had much going for him. Sunny is nothing anymore.”

“I want to kill him,” Harry deduced.

“Because I killed Gemma or because you want to do something for yourself?” Niall asked.

He crossed the aisle separating them and furthered towards the gate, backwards. He kept his eyes on them. Grime hollowed out his cheeks, smeared over a dawning bruise, not unlike the two of them.

As Niall’s steps slowed, as if a sentimentality of sorts kept him chained to the grounds, Louis assessed himself and Harry. He weakened at the sight, whereas Harry only gripped his weapon anew and charged. And Niall didn’t flee. He fended off the attack with a bistre mouth and steadfast hands.

Louis didn’t realise his phone was ringing.

Before Zayn had time to form a word rather than disgruntled noise, Louis hissed, “Where the fuck are you? Are you all right?”

_“Are you still in the cemetery?”_

“It’s nothing,” Niall repeated, taming his voice with each pummel into Harry’s guarding bat.

 _“Mrs Horan is dead,”_ Zayn carried on, at the same time that Niall averted a follow-up and leapt over the stonewall and into the night with Harry tearing after. _“Mr Horan is in custody and I think Niall will want to visit Peak Park before he’s caught.”_

Louis chased them. Grass tufts bloomed in the wake of his deep footfalls.

“He’s not planning on being caught,” Louis hissed reluctantly, with wet snow pelting his face from the naked tree crowns and ice catching in his lungs.

He cut a corner and regained sight of Harry’s blotchy skin shifting below streetlights, Niall’s skidding steps further ahead. The row of curtain-covered windows remained still despite hollers and crackles of metal and asphalt. The richness of a woodstove permeated the air.

“Where _are_ you? What’s with the park anyway?”

_“There’s a car there, just for him. I’ve slashed the tyres.”_

“I think we’re going to kill him. Either he escapes or Harry will murder him.” Louis dodged, decided for a shortcut across the playground where a gaggle of kings swung and laughed, and caught up with the boys on the other side. Louis’ voice felt like a whip in his throat when he said, “We just passed the school.”

Zayn stayed silent but the breaking of glass and denting of vehicle haunted the quiet.

A rock sailed by his head. A jangle came from Harry’s bat swirled in front of them both. Niall stumbled over a mound as he veered off the path, emptying the rocks from his gaping pockets.

A family of four sculpted a snowman – the adjacent ground had been swept clear of snow. Niall swerved it. Harry lost control and beheaded it. The park opened before them, pristine and pierced by a pyramid. Frosted spotlights fought to lighten their path while their boots uncertainly hit the shovelled stones.

When the three of them stopped it was as if there had never been a sound in the world. Ferocious as it fell, the snow burked itself, plastered to the glass monument behind Niall.

“Zayn’s here,” Louis said, just for Harry’s ears.

Harry stopped himself short of hurling the bat at Niall. It went unnoticed, as Niall clutched his arm where the rake had punctured him.

“Let me do this,” he said.

“When you’re on a leash in someone’s basement,” Harry said, voice as strained as his demeanour.

“We could have broken you as well! I could have kept you two apart, shaved off all essential bits of you until you couldn’t remember that there had been a before, and so surely, there must be an after, and there would be no mirrors to testify, and you’d still be able to feel the chains around your ankle and throat. So let me have this one thing.”

Harry closed his mouth. Niall swung.

Glass hailed across the white crust of earth and chunks of the pipe with it. Louis darted forward with covered eyes, relying on touch and as he fumbled for any body part of Niall’s to put the rake in. He found more glass and the hit clattered throughout his entire body, twisting him into the diagonal wall while Niall found footing again a few feet away. Louis came eye to eye with the memorial bronze plate at the foot of the pyramid.

_IN LOVING MEMORY OF GREG HORAN_

Niall didn’t laugh as he kicked Louis down by the shoulder. Something inside Louis snapped out of place and he wailed.

Niall made way for the woods, knowing their weapons rested below heaps of snow in the night. Sirens coloured the ground and filtered in the trees. Light sprouted off the pyramid.

Harry wore a jacket when Louis looked up. Then he gawked at something on the other side of the pyramid and a gunshot sent Louis back into hiding. Warmth enveloped him while unknown forces unmoored him from the ground. Another shot fired. This one reverberated his entire body.

He hid his face in Zayn’s chest, everything tearing inside him as the both of them shook with the shots, familiar scents stringing together the present with the past. As Niall cried out, Louis imagined him barefoot on a neglected swing set in the yard, deep in mud, falling.

Zayn slackened against him, drew him in closer. His stubble cut Louis’ cheek but Louis stayed, arm woefully hanging.

Niall fused with the woods on the other side of the lawn.

“I didn’t kill him,” Zayn said, and he was talking over Louis’ head.

Louis’ head skipped with the iced tremors Zayn suffered, their teeth clattering as one. Since he refused to move, Zayn pressed the outline of the gun to his back, still tucked into his palm.

He said, “It’s Liam’s.”

“Is he here?” Harry asked.

“Police are. Mrs Horan drove off a bridge, some miles north of Midsummer Manor. I think Liam will be charged.”

Louis cocooned himself and Zayn’s ample shoulders with his jacket, turned to gauge Harry with the flaps dipping down on his torso under the breeze and downpour.

“They kept you in chains?” he asked.

Harry dropped the bat unceremoniously and blew at his hands – long, wet breaths.

“Not me,” he said.

They watched the cars skid in. Parked in their way was a hefty creature with wheels made for pressing through the pointy grounds of a quarrel, recently incapacitated. Like ants they streamed between the trees, pursued by a sumptuous canine that sought thrill rather than solution in the hunt. Louis waited for Niall’s protest, for the German Shepard to split the inbound quiet with barks. The officers kept marching.

“I’m freezing,” Zayn admitted.

Louis broke free. He gathered blood or snot from his nose on his hoodie as he patted for his phone. He noted that Harry’s tee had been nearly severed at the left armpit. A consistent nuance of white tinted his entire body. Louis moved away from them, away from the sirens, not flinching at the aluminium at his ear.

In the background, Zayn pointed to the black car among police vehicles, to which Harry asked, “Can Niall even drive?”

Jay answered while Louis spotted policemen emerging solemnly from the woods, a band of torches. Two officers had a boy strung up between them. He had lost a shoe.

“Can you pick us up at the park?” Louis asked.

 

✘

 

It was winter and Sunny Hills had been bereft of its latest claim at Britain’s _Best Kept Town_. Alike the arcade, the café boarded up without being tended to by the municipality. It became a resort for daredevil tweens that would come to harbour a rich lore of ghost stories and symbolism of Sunny Hills’ fallen glory.

Newspapers spoke about nothing but the human trafficking tragedy in Yorkshire. Gradually the odd article listing the best Christmas presents to buy your partner slipped in, and soon only a tiny excerpt informed the public daily about the case’s development. At least until another Manor was discovered a couple of shires south and the interest rekindled.

It was winter and so, somewhere in town, snowmen were raised. And somewhere in town, Liam Payne received help wallpapering a new flat. After a heavy forenoon he kicked back at a coffee table Harry had brought over and the two of them had tea in pensive silence. Mr and Mrs Styles would shortly come over with housewarming gifts, at which point the topic between the boys would shift from exes and therapists to what the new football season could have in store.

On the other side of town, the Tomlinsons had swapped their biweekly Monopoly session for a dinner as wealthy in flavour as it was in company. The family’s plus one had written a piece for both the local paper and the bigger ones, unfortunately lost in countless interviews with the teenage child-abductor’s former best mate.

Jay had read Zayn’s article, after little convincing from her son. She used every dead space at dinner to comment on it.

It could sound like so: “What you brought to the debate was a fresh angle, and isn’t it a shame that young adults aren’t taken seriously, maybe especially in matters that concern them? As long as you keep striving you’ll get the recognition you deserve, or I’ll have a word with them.”

While Louis could add, “Oh, he’ll make top editor before any of us know it.” And Zayn could have the privilege of being modest as even Lottie viewed him with respect, whereas Louis could receive a heel to his shin for the second-hand boasting.

And if it didn’t concern journalistic feats, it could sound like so: “I’ve always wanted to use _strapping_ to describe one of Louis’ friends and so you come along. I’m very glad that you two have found each other.”

It was winter, and in the window nook of a vomit-shaded house sat two boys with legs crossing each other and bruised skin. They couldn’t sit out on the shingles. With their stomachs full, they didn’t want to, either.

“Have you told her about Harry?” Zayn asked.

“Should I?”

“She’ll wonder why you aren’t hanging out anymore.”

She would. But so far she hadn’t asked further about the dropped charges against Liam. Neither had she brought up the Horan name in her household.

“Are you still in love with Liam?” Louis wondered.

For a moment, he expected an open answer.

Zayn just said, “Doniya broke up with him.”

If Louis examined Zayn’s hands, he wondered if he would be able to outline the gun in his clutch, if there had been a possibility of better aim. As of now, Niall stood trial with an injured quad and the people’s disgust veiling him to the press. Louis wondered where Zayn would be if Niall hadn’t gotten the chance to stand trial.

Zayn drank from the tumbler of redcurrant soda Jay Tomlinson had made earlier that summer. It still mesmerised Louis to see him chase an idea, and he was always on edge when that thought crystallised in words. This time, it was wary.

“I think I know why Harry did it.”

Unnecessary scented candles sprawled around, tickled into Lottie’s room where she eagerly phoned Waliyha about concert tickets.

“It’s a theory,” he tacked on, but Louis had already taken the bait.

“Share,” Louis prompted, tried not to think about the note stuck to his rucksack on a foreboding October morning.

“I think it was a coping mechanism, from the beginning. Especially after what Niall said about Gemma.”

“How do you mean?”

“That he thought he could protect you where he couldn’t protect her and it went overboard. It’s a reason I can live with.”

“Remains the same though,” Louis reminded him.

All Zayn said was, “Naturally,” but Louis wasn’t quite there yet.

“How does it feel to have your best friend be a child-abductor?”

Zayn wryly batted back, “What’s it like to have your boyfriend stalk and harass your family?”

And Louis had to suffocate a grin while he took a swig of the tart currants. It was a ruefully entertaining thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. You can find me on whellks.tumblr.com xx


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